Shrug...   “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”   You won’t find a single programming-language made by humans (as opposed to the space-aliens who haunt the hallowed halls of Academia ...) which does not contain a double-handful of “idiosyncracies” just like these.   They are only strange and objectionable when they differ from the just-as-idiosyncratic idiosyncracies of the language(s) that you are now used to.

Perl is one of the more-difficult tools to get to know, partly because it is quite lassiez faire:   “TMTOWTDI™ = There’s More Than One Way To Do It,™” and Perl does not tell you which road to take.   Many people, especially those fresh from academic institutions, are more accustomed to strongly-typed languages which have a strong and explicit sense of “at compile-time” error-checking.   Perl is not-at-all like that.   If you do not wish to use strict; use warnings; then Perl will not demand that you do so.   (Whereas other language systems might barf that “you did it Wrong” and, having not run the program at all, refuse to do anything.)   It will do its best to figure out what you meant to do, so to speak, and it will do something.   This is by-design, but it is initially unsettling to many.   Of all the languages I use regularly, Perl just might be the one that it took me the longest to come to know.   However, today, it remains one of the small handful that I use most often.