> early Perl was missing little things like named function arguments

It's still missing those :)

(To be clear for people unfamiliar with Perl, it probably will never have them, because it doesn't need them. In Perl, all functions effectively have a single parameter of array type. The standard convention is to assign each array entry to a variable at the start of your function definition, and the names of those variables then effectively act as parameter names. But that's just a convention and you can do something else if you want.)