> Another thing that Perl seems to lack is orthogonality, I always get the impression that the language allows you to solve the same problem in 10 different ways.

This is a deliberate feature of Perl, whose motto is "There's More Than One Way To Do It".

Not to defend the practice, since the fact that there are 10 ways to do something means that (1) there's a 90% chance that when you look at somebody else's code you can't understand it, unless you learned all 10 ways and (2) at least 50% of those ways are objectively worse than the alternatives, but people will still use them because Perl programmers are encouraged to solve problems in whatever way they can.

Contrast with Python, where "There should be one - and preferably only one - obvious way to do it".