On the future of Perl 5

"""
"Explicit" as in implicit type conversion? Just right now got bitten by that:
0: looks like a zero, tastes like a zero, but somewhere along the line got converted to a string and therefore it's suddenly True, not False.
"""

Please be more specific. Where are you saying that Python does implicit type conversion? Python types dynamically, but strongly. Sure you're not thinking of Javascript, where "2" + 2 = "22"?