I'm learning perl right now and I'm bewildered at how could I overlook it for such a long time.<p>With all its quirks and strange design decisions (especially compared to elegant languages like ML or Scheme), it has it's own killer features I missed from other scripting languages so much, such as the ability to embed a shell command in backquotes and get its output easily.<p>Also the notion of context is pretty good, allowing to write a far shorter code, even sigils contribute to that naturally (in languages like bash they feel like a useless burden).
The main highlight of this release is the new OOP system: <a href="https://perldoc.perl.org/5.38.0/perlclass" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://perldoc.perl.org/5.38.0/perlclass</a>
Perl is such an interesting language. It's the first language I learnt seriously (pity me) and despite its quirks and failings, it was always a huge amount of fun.