I'll take a guess that you didn't grow up in the UNIX shell? perl syntax is actually highly intuitive because it copies nearly everything from pre-existing too

I'll take a guess that you didn't grow up in the UNIX shell? perl syntax is actually highly intuitive because it copies nearly everything from pre-existing tools, shell scripts, sed, awk, and so on. perl just packaged it all into one cohesive tool. It was one of those languages where you barely need to read the manual because you can predict things because the syntax will be exactly what'd you'd guess it to be. All this, of course, if and only if you had previously grown up on shell, sed, awk and friends. For anyone who hasn't, I can totally see how perl seems like alien gobbledygook.