scala instead of perl

I've used perl for years as a "better shell script", and found it perfectly natural and easy to express the things I've asked of it.
The other day I did something that seemed perfectly natural to me, I passed a list to a function that returned another list.
I expected this to work, as I would in any language.
I was testing each function separately and everything seemed fine.
So I started testing the script as a whole; that's when strange things started happening.
Lists starting containing too many values, and of the wrong kind.
So, I did some googling without really knowing what kind of problem it was; assuming the whole time that I'd written some simple semantic error or something.
What I didn't expect though was the real problem :
Perl doesn't support lists properly.

You can't have a list of lists, you can't pass a list to a function or return a list from a function.
You can have a list of list references however, or pass list references to a function, or return a list reference.
So this whole time, I'd just happened to be passing scalars around, thinking perl was a pretty straightforward language. The reality is that it isn't actually much higher level than C.

It was originally designed late eighties to early nineties, so it makes sense that the OO and functional aspects aren't as well thought out as newer languages. I guess the idea of collections being fundamental wasn't that big at the time either.

I've recently had a chance to use ruby again, and this time I've actually enjoyed it. Especially the meta programming aspect. As ruby was designed a fair bit later, it feels a lot more modern; and lists work as I expect !

I think from now on, (assuming I got a choice), I'll be using perl _only_ for very simple shell scripts, or not at all; and using more competent languages (like ruby) for anything of substance.

For this specific task, I've reimplemented it as a Scala script; and in doing so I've fixed a bunch of bugs in my original perl code.
It's also made the code run a bit faster, as well as made the code easier to change.
Scala's regex and system exec libraries aren't as succinct as perl's; but you'd have to make them first class features of the language (as perl has) to reach that goal.
It's still run as a script, so it won't be any different from the user's point of view.