I think it's more a case of people think they understand Perl, or can make assumptions because of their existing C/PHP/Shell programming experience and apply it to Perl without problem, and that is not always the case. The fact is, Perl is fundamentally different, but looks just similar enough to fool people.
If it looked like Lisp, people would be less likely to think that it's just a matter of applying their C experience, but alas, it generally looks pretty familiar, if a bit messy, to users of other imperative languages.
If you are trying to understand, write or change a Perl script, and you don't know what context a statement takes place in, or what I mean by context in this case, then you don't know what you are doing. (I mean you in the general sense, not as an indictment against the parent).
If it looked like Lisp, people would be less likely to think that it's just a matter of applying their C experience, but alas, it generally looks pretty familiar, if a bit messy, to users of other imperative languages.
If you are trying to understand, write or change a Perl script, and you don't know what context a statement takes place in, or what I mean by context in this case, then you don't know what you are doing. (I mean you in the general sense, not as an indictment against the parent).