You are using references unnecessarily; a hash would work just fine. I suspect what you probably want is something more like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

open(LANGUAGES,"languages.txt") or die "cannot open languages.txt";

my $line;
my %hash;
foreach $line (<LANGUAGES>) {
    my ($language, $author) = split ', ',    $line;
    $hash{$language} = $author;
}

my $lang;
print "Enter a programming language: ";
chomp ($lang = <STDIN>);
if (exists $hash{$lang}) {
    print "$lang was originally developed by $hash{$lang}.\n";
} else {
    warn "Language not found!";
}
[download]

Originally posted as a Categorized Answer.