> Perl is as hard for novices to learn as a language with a randomly-designed syntax

Make something accessible to novices IMHO is a wrong goal in many cases. A tool like a programming language used day to day for many months or years. What important is how efficiently you can use it after spending enough time to learn it (I would say a month or two should be enough for most languages if you know already a few, but it depends).

Of course we cannot ignore how hard is to learn a language otherwise we will have languages like C++ which require years to master it (and even coders with years of experience fall pray to numerous hidden traps of the language).