It's not so difficult to do, it's difficult to get people to do it.

Some of perl's features use syntax which is either very concise or uses implied operations or operands. Things like regexes, sorting, subroutine arguments, special variables can all be used in a manner which makes things more cryptic. In many instances you can be explicit (for instance with arguments):

my ($filename, $data_ref) = @_;

Rather than , randomly in code somewhere:

my $filename = shift;

If you cannot express something more explicitly in syntax to be clear you really should be using comments to elaborate.

Arguably this problem is the same across all languages. The issue with perl is that the brevity and flexibility of the language can exacerbate the grief one experiences when working with unfamiliar code.

I think this sort of argument misses the point of my comment. I really don't want to write serious software with Perl, I want something more powerfull than AWK, but not as cumbersome as a more "structured" language. I literally use AWK daily for random stuff I'm most likely gonna throw away or put it in a script which I'm gonna throw away happily the moment it breaks. Sometimes, AWK is not enough, and for these usecases, in my short expirience, Perl is unmached.

Lol, what? Why? Are you that bad at programming that you can't structure code well without guardrails?