Back in 1994, Perl was an amazing thing to me (as someone who was accustomed to mainframe scripting languages up to that point), and it helped make me very productive. But it sometimes would seem like the epitome of "Write once, read never". Tim Bray even remarked on its abstruseness back in 2003:

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/31/PerlAngst