I remember the first time a saw Perl, it looked like some kind of alien language from outer space, all the symbols it used looked insane.

But once you get it, its pretty intuitive to use.

The worst part about it was the syntax for object oriented programming, which in raku (perl 6) is a lot better and intuitive.

Raku has some great ideas like grammars, but has a lot of new magic symbology and lost what i thought was an intuitive way of regular expressions in Perl 5.

=~ vs ~~