skynight is correct that Perl 5 contains some fundamental semantic traps.

It does, but only when you're used to different semantics. Perl was my second programming language, but different enough from BASIC to assume no rule would be the same. I never fell into any of its well known traps. (I tend to get bitten by the more obscure semantics.)

Well, that's certainly an interesting point -- sometimes it's better for different things to look different so you won't get them confused -- but it's actually fundamentally different from the way perl was originally conceived. It was supposed to look a lot like things that programmers were already familiar with, so it would make them feel like they knew what was going on.

And I think the larger point here is that it's really okay to criticize the way something was done in perl. You can be totally committed to perl culture and still think that type globs were a mess.

(Or course, these days it's a little late to bother criticizing perl 5, since the design of perl 6 is pretty well fixed.)