Okay, I'll pretend that all things Perl emanate from Larry Wall (but I feel sorry for all the people right now doing the grunt work), and ask the question again, why? As you mentioned, the major hurdles to overcome with Perl are the data types and structure, not how to concatenate and/or make a method call. These are not important or even useful changes to the language: they are syntactic sugar, as the argument goes. So why step on the people who do use the language for the sake of those who do not?