> Perl's syntax is designed to be more close to natural language.

s/natural/English/. Some languages can be parsed by computer without problems. For example, simple 15kb C program can parse 100% of technical text in Esperanto, 98% of technical text in Ukrainian (my native language), 84% of technical text in Russian, and so on. Not so simple parser can parse more than 100% of text, i.e. it can fix errors in text.

For me, shell is much closer to my native language than perl or SQL.

PS. AFAIK, there is no natural language in the wild nature. :-/ All human languages are artificial.