I actually like the explicit "I'm reading from a special list" syntax because that's what it's doing. A lot of Perl's "ugliness" comes from the language being pretty honest about what it's doing.
Actually, though I tried C++ starting in 1993, Java from 1996, I didn't really grok OO until I tried it in Perl a few years later. Because it shows its guts out, without any sugar coating, I understood what it was about.
