> IMHO the biggest issue that blocked Perl's broader adoption was the really obfuscated handling of nested data structures including objects

Oh man did we ever abuse the shit out of the loosy-goosy data structures you could make in perl. Almost any time you needed to debug or trace something, you'd pretty print the entire data structure you were passing around. Some of those suckers would be huge and you'd be passing that structure around to almost everything in your codebase!

As an outsider it might appear scary and a massive code smell... but when you worked on that codebase it just kinda all made sense somehow. It was just how perl programs rolled.

I have yet to work in any other language that let you use and abuse the native data structures quite like you could in Perl.