If you give people basic operations, try to make them efficient ones.

That is one thing that Perl has historically done very well on. Everything has a significant overhead. Assume it is about a factor of 10. But their native data types (which there are very few of) can be put together easily to implement virtually any easily stated algorithm. No, you can't choose to make subtle trade-offs. But it is darned easy to get something that works, and if it worse it is probably not, barring your stupidity and that factor of 10, going to be that bad.

While getting everything just right might be really fun, but get it wrong and you are in trouble. If you have that factor of 10 to throw away up front, well I create enough of my own problems to think about. (What do you mean I have deep recursion...?)

Cheers,
Ben