> What always kills me is the weirdness of the basic data structures, > array/stack function calls, and the truly impressively weird ways > Objects are done.

Well, Perl 5 has scalars, arrays and dictionaries -- just like Python. Unlike Python, however, Perl function arguments are always implicit/variadic by default (and stored inside the implicit "@_" variable). This can be a benefit or a curse depending on the context. Furthermore, Perl 5 does support both "call by value" and "call by reference". This distinction can confuse programmers coming from more modern languages where usually everything is a scalar reference. But you have to keep in mind Perl was invented in the 80s and put great emphasis on compatibility. Changing calling conventions would have broken many modules.

edit:

Regarding objects: The object system is rather simple, it's just many Perl hackers invented their own object systems on top of that. Basically, a Perl class is just a module. An object is just a reference to a dictionary that got the class name attached by applying the "bless" operator:

  package Foo;

  sub new {
    my ($class) = @_;
    my $object = {};

    bless $object, $class;
  }

  sub do_stuff {
    my ($self) = @_;

    # do stuff

    return $self;
  }

  my $obj = Foo->new();
  $obj->do_stuff()->do_stuff();

That's about it! Well, you also have inheritance using "use base ..." and you can bless other fundamental types which usually is not a bright idea. Many other object oriented languages make object orientation unnecessarily much more complex (looking at you C++).