This reminds me of some nodes around here on BrainF**k, namely the nodes BrainF**k Interpreter and BrainF**k question.

If anyone thinks that Perl is hard to read, they've never used BrainF**k, TECO, INTERCAL (which would be a good thing not to use), or any of a host of other very capable and sometimes powerful (apl comes to mind) languages and tools.

Sometimes it's good to do things for beginners, but when that gets in the way of advanced use, you either get users leaving the tool or, unfortunately, piling grotesque extensions onto a design poorly suited to them. Hence you have things like Turbo Pascal, Realizer, and Ada. ;-) I'm glad Perl has been extended through modules for exactly this reason, and that the core language has somewhat of a learning curve. I don't want an OO, parallel, highly optimizing Logo installation with visual tools and a full debugging suite.