> Perl in the hands of a small, very experienced team had the highest productivity and quality I have seen - but I would not want use Perl in a project with higher developer churn and lots of inexperienced coders.
This has been my experience as well.
I think that's why "medium powered" languages such as Python and Java tend to get the widest adoption over time. They are less expressive but also have fewer gotchas, and in a team of 100s or 1000s of good-but-not-stellar developers who come and go, they end up being the least painful for the organization.
No language solves all problems obviously, but clearly some are better than others in nthat regard. I have no experience in Rust but many years with Perl and Java (and others). Perl in the hands of a small, very experienced team had the highest productivity and quality I have seen - but I would not want use Perl in a project with higher developer churn and lots of inexperienced coders.