Making Perl more like modern Python or JS is not improvement to language, you need another word for that, something like "trends" or "fashion", or something like that. I see this list as a simplification of language (and in a bad way), not improvement. As if some newby programmer would not want to improve himself, to get himself up to match the complexity of language, but blaim language complexity and demand the language complexity to go down to his (low) level. "I don't want to count closing brackets, make something that will close them all", "I don't want to watch for semicolons, let interpreter watch for end of sentence for me", "This complex function is hard to understand and remember how to use it in a right way, give me bunch of simple functions that will do the same as this one function, but they will be easy to remember".

Making tool more simple will not make it more powerful, or more efficient, but instead could make it less efficient, because the tool will have to waste some of its power to compensate user's ineptitude. Interpreter would waste CPU and memory to comprehend sentence ending, this "new" closing brackets and extra function calls, and what's gain here? I see only one - that newby programmer could write code with less mind efforts. So it's not improvement of language to do more with less, but instead a change that will cause tool do same with more. Is it improvement? I don't think so.