Yep, default variables and context are important to Perl. I like a lot of the design, but there is a lot of cruft that has piled up in 30 years. Perl6 addresses that while adding support for FP, OO, array programming, grammar based programming...etc. I find it quite pleasant to read and write. The problem is the implementation is immature and I'm not sure it will ever be as fast as we need for a production language.