>>6 Perl is like the English of the programming world. To paraphrase James Nicoll: Perl is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. It doesn't just borrow features; on occasion, Perl has persued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Python is like the French of the programming world. It's not good enough for Python programmers unless they invented it.

Frankly, named captures are good for very complicated regular expressions; the kind that look like lots of noise. The kind that no self-respecting python programmer would let muddle up their program. The kind that fast perl programs have a lot of. I'm surprised python programmers would admit to having such a feature, so it doesn't surprise me at all that it took Perl a whole version number to adopt it (5.8 was released shortly after python 2.1 which was when the feature was introduced IIRC)