Easy to read, reminds written english

Yes, English is full of '$', '@' and all the other punctuation marks. "Easy to read" is a very debatable point, and "Hard to read" is usually the nr. 1 complaint against Perl.

Regular expressions

I wouldn't bring up regular expressions if I were to defend the point that "Perl is easy to read, reminds written English".

Easily extendable (XS)

XS requires knowledge of C, Perl internals and the XS language itself, and access to a C compiler. Many people have problems even installing an XS module because they lack the latter, and require precompiled binaries.