Perl is too often disparaged as a “scripting language” but its willingness to be influenced by (ok, to steal from) other languages and techniques and concepts that might otherwise be restricted to the academic ghetto make it something far more exciting.

(regular expressions, closures, functional programming techniques in Perl5;
coroutines, continuations, built in recursive descent parser in Perl 6).

F# looks interesting: but on the MS page it
admits that “F# is essentially an implementation of the core of the OCaml language.”
I’m not sure I understand why this is the “future of programming languages”? ;->