That's actually almost exactly the same thing as claiming that no language should be very different to everything else that has come before it.

I'm really not a Perl fan, but I really don't buy readability arguments. I'm a functional programmer, and the exact same feeble criticisms are leveled against ML and Haskell and Lisp and Scheme and whatever else. People say "ugh! It's so unreadable!", when they really mean "I can't read that having spent 2 days learning this new language, but I find it very easy to read C/PHP/Java/whatever, which I've been doing for several years".

It can take a very, very long time to actually become fluent in a programming language and paradigm to the point where you actually have a mental model of its semantics that is aligned with reality. This is why rookie programmers tend to get things wrong.

I spent almost 6 months learning Prolog. If I went and tried to write prolog now, I doubt I could remember very much at all. I've done C for more like 10 years, and I can still write C reliably despite not having touched it for 2 or 3 years.

So I don't buy it. I'm really not a Perl fan (nor a Python fan), but the idea that it's worse than python because it requires more intellectual effort to learn is bullshit, unless you're having a programming-for-people-of-limited-intelligence competition.