In natural languages, there are two kinds of vocabularies. Active and passive one. Active is that you('d) use yourself, passive is what you can understand. The later is usually much bigger and much easier to extend. Guess what, the same thing works with Perl. You do not have to actively use all the ways, at most you have to understand the most common ones. Besides once you get above the syntactic level there are more than one ways in any language.