1. The Perl documentation isn't aimed at small children.

   No. The greater percentage of them will be non-native-English speaking adults without the care-free time & boundless curiosity children have, nor the lack of self-conciousness children exhibit, when they are learning languages.

   Instead, they will have jobs to do, or studies to complete and deadlines to meet. All the social awkwardness, distraction by the illogical, and pre-patterned thinking that means it is 3 to 5 times harder for the average adult to learn a new language than a child.

   What kind of presumptive, jobs-worth, bloody-mindedness does it take to deliberately continue to use an obscure phrase that defies logical analysis and has to be looked up to understand it meaning, when there are other far clearer, logical substitutes?

2. Enough people understand and use it that's idiom in its context.

   The world:1.0; The Western world:0.2; College educated Western world:0.02; CompSci educated:0.001; Native English-speaking:0.00025. It's not so many really.

   It would be really interesting to know where that phrase originates, because despite the "Perl works like C" reference, it does not appear anywhere in K&R.

   Now there is a piece of clear, straightforward plain-English technical writing. They didn't feel the need to tech-it-up with meaningless linguistic constructs; nor mark their membership of the technocrati with shibboleths.

3. If you want to cater for people...

   Yeah! That's kinda the point of a self-help learning site like Perlmonks. Helping people.

   Not baffling them with bs; nor highlighting their difference background or education from ours; nor ...

And I think it was LW himself who set out to make, and continues to want, Perl to be easy to learn.