People waxing poetic about their time using Perl back in the late 1990s/early 2000s don't have a vote because they clung onto good bits and have long forgotten the ugly.
> it really makes Stream-of-Conscious programming the norm
Are you sure it's a Good Thing? Really sure? What if you have teammates? What if you have a life? What if you need to revise your stream of consciousness after a year? Still sure?
And that still happens at stream-of-conciousness.
Yes I'm sure.
Having worked in many languages over many decades, I've learned that a high quality codebase is built by high quality developers, largely independent of the languages they use. You can build an unmaintainable mess in any language as easily as you can build a high quality codebase in Perl. I would concede that you can more easily build an unmaintainable mess in Perl than in many languages but that's up to you; you can do most things more easily in Perl than in many languages ;)
The happy medium is to write your program twice: Write it solo in Perl for rapid thought-to-code, figuring out architectural issues along the way. Then, write it again in Python for scalable collaboration using the revised architecture. This gives you a working solution for the problem FAST and adheres to "Do it, then do it right".
Unfortunately, this doesn't scale to systems. I do hope LLM-driven transmogrification becomes a real thing.
I have an affection for both Forth and Lisp, two languages that have also been called highly productive but write only.
I think a working early version- even if its a spreadsheet- is 10x of a supposedly 80% done version of something else. The latter of which I must now return to unfortunately…