Perl is sort of like trying to read someone else's brain (in this case Larry Wall's). You get themes and kind of the gist of where it's going, but it never quit

Perl is sort of like trying to read someone else's brain (in this case Larry Wall's). You get themes and kind of the gist of where it's going, but it never quite adds up to some sort of coherent whole. The defense has always been that Perl is designed more like natural language than programming language, ok, but: natural languages are a LOT harder to learn than programming languages. Put me in a room with Haskell and I'll learn it in a month. Give me a month of training in french and I'll maybe be able to not make an entire ass of myself if I try to get from point A to point B. Human languages are hard. Design wise -- I'm not sure that's what you want to aim for. Almost everything you learn is... surprising. Like flattening lists. Useful in a context, maybe, but is that the kind of thing anyone would ever expect? And why is "list" (@) part of the variable name in the first place? It's like "dynamically typed, kind of, except your variable name has to say if it's one thing or many things or many things referenced with keys". What the fuck? I'd rather the python way of "it's a name that points to a thing, whatever that thing is". GOT IT. Simple. I program in C++ for a living, probably the biggest clusterF of a language ever devised (outside of perl), and the thought of reading Perl still terrifies me.