Possibly naive and unoriginal idea follows, but it strides into the blinding sun of the PerlMonks arena...

If the principal reason that managers and others don't like Perl is the difficulty of maintaining or extending a Perl script written by an earlier programmer, then what if...

CritiPerl -- a flavor of Perl in which a program has zero violations of Perl::Critic at the 'brutal' level of severity. If a violation occurs during development, it would fail "perl -c program_name.pl".

Or perhaps there would be a different severity level that implemented other coding guidelines enforced by Perl::Critic at a new 'critiperl' severity level, which would be based on coding techniques that are "straightforward" in terms of being capable of easy maintaining and extension of the program by later developers (many or most of which probably would be the same as those of CritiPerl's 'brutal' severity level).

There would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth in developing an agreed-upon critiperl severity level, of course (Perl being Perl), but what if the result were the ability to present an essentially clearer, cost-effective language to decision-makers (e.g., programming instructors as well as managers). It would have the benefit of being understandable by existing Perl programmers, and would be able to use all of the wonderful CPAN modules, whether or not the code inside those modules is CritiPerl-compliant.

It wouldn't be a new language (though essentially it is, and that's how it could be pitched) because it would be implemented just by saying that "a CritiPerl program must start with 'use CritiPerl'." The naming and marketing would be critical (cough, cough).

It's sounding a bit like the "use Modern::Perl" route at this point in my thinking. Or a brutal version of Guacamole ("use Guacamole"). Or something like Typescript is to JavaScript.

CritiPerl wouldn't be a Swiss army knife; it would be more of a Japanese sword. It's easy to figure out how to wield it, and devastatingly effective (especially given the legion of CPAN modules at the programmer's side).

(Note: Some stylistic-only edits have been made here.)