[knightcrusader]

I wouldn't say its "missing" named function arguments. Treating arguments and return values as lists is very powerful. Perl is very Lisp-like in that aspect.

Also, CPAN is considered one of Perl's strengths. How did CPAN cause Perl to burn out?

[doctor_eval]

In terms of arguments, there's no reason that Perl couldn't have had named arguments and still passed lists around behind the scenes. But the lack of arguments really makes it hard to understand what those arguments are supposed to be. The question is why Perl didn't continue to dominate the scripting landscape and I simply offer this as one possibility.

My recollection of CPAN - and we are talking a really long time ago now - but it was just very much the same kind of dependency hell that we now have with NPM. In fact now that I mention it, I think there are strong comparisons to be made between Node and Perl. CPAN was great until it wasn't, and after a while - in my experience - it was mostly not great.