Yes, the problem was that to read Perl you had to know every way to express things, and Perl was much, much too flexible there. I wrote a bunch of Perl in the e

Yes, the problem was that to read Perl you had to know every way to express things, and Perl was much, much too flexible there. I wrote a bunch of Perl in the early 2000s and I hated it. Both Ruby and Python were far superior. Even Java was better (albeit with other caveats). I hated Perl. List vs. scalar context is one example of a "feature" in Perl that causes confusion in readers.