Sorry your question got reaped initially. Welcome aboard (though, you'll probably find the site easier to use if you register).

Yes, Perl is similar to those other languages in many ways, especially when you start out. But I think Perl gets quite a bit different from them as you get more advanced. In some ways, it is a rather unusual language. It puts a lot more stress on how the programmer thinks.

But it is way past my bed time so I won't get deeper than that, at least not right now.

Perl est un esprit LISP dans un corps C, n'est-ce pas? :-)
-- Philippe Verdret

(Note: "corps C" sounds like "corset" in French.)

That's the essence, basically. It looks like bog-standard imperative programming when you start out - the more you move down the line, the more functional programming enters the picture though. map, closures, slices, and more, they all contribute to the picture. The closer you get there, the more concise but simple your code will become. (If it's getting shorter but more cryptic, you're doing something wrong.)

Makeshifts last the longest.