[labster]

Cool story bro.

To me it just sounds like your colleagues were a little nuts. You don't need metaprogramming to write a large application, and reaching for Devel::Declare should be reserved for last resorts and "hold my beer" moments. You're right that the conferences have a lot of this kind of stuff, but most of us know better than to actually use it, and read Perl Best Practices.

Most of these issues are solved in Perl 6. Any language changes are scoped lexically by default (e.g. declaring sub infix:<==>). Emphasis on threads instead of forking for concurrency, with await and first class Promises. If you want to write see, just write normal C and use NativeCall, instead of writing in the bizarre XS dialect of C. But it's kind of a different language... yeah.

[Floegipoky]

I'm not going to say we weren't all nuts... but a lot of advanced language features, including metaprogramming, were necessary to build things that other communities take for granted: frameworks, test harnesses, mocking, static analysis, etc.