Everything is easy if you have experience with C++.<p>I fail to see how PHP is clearer than Perl.  It may have fewer special characters, but everything is done with oddly-named functions that take positional arguments in an inconsistent order, return error codes instead of throwing exceptions, and randomly spew warning messages.<p>From a language design standpoint... there is no design.  Perl may not be perfect either, but the design has been flexible enough to radically modify as the community sees fit.  Or rather, how <i>you</i> choose to modify it, as most modifications are modular and only affect a single lexical scope.  Oh.