One could equally argue that not jumping on new concepts until they've been demonstrated to have real world value is an advantage.

As a community, we tend to like to really think about things before implementing them - which means that while new ideas might turn up in perl a bit later than in other places, they tend to turn up in a well thought out way that we can confidently maintain backwards compatibility with over time.

When you're writing code that may still be in production in five or ten years, this tends to be an advantage.