I guess that bottom line of what I am trying to say is that not all perl code is unreadable crap. That has more to do with the writer than the language. And, different languages make different things easier.

No final "right" or "wrong" choice for all use cases.

> List <Integer> aList = Arrays.asList( new int [] { 1, 3, 5 });

You can drop the inner array, asList takes variable number of arguments.

> // I need to check if Java 8 has map literals a la Groovy...

Sadly not, IIRC they've backed off from literals towards a Guava style static factory methods, which I'm not thrilled about.

> I'm not seeing that much of a difference in parameter passing, other than the explicit reference/dereference syntax.

So let's say I'm a newbie Perl developer just exploring subs.

  sub stuff {
      my ($a, $b) = @_;
      print "$a and $b\n";
  }

  my $a = 1;
  my $b = 2;

  stuff($a, $b);

It works! Hurrah. Feeling clever, I move onto collections.

  sub stuff {
      my (@a, %b) = @_;
      print "$a[0] and $b{A}\n";
  }

  my @a = (1);
  my %b = (A => 2);

  stuff(@a, %b);

And it doesn't work at all. @a has some additional values, and %b is undef.

So yes, let's use references.

  sub stuff {
      my ($a, $b) = @_;
      print "${$a}[0] and ${$b}{A}\n";
  }

  my @a = (1);
  my %b = (A => 2);

  stuff(\@a, \%b);

Except now, I have two ways of working with Perl's collections, two separate sets of sigils, and all because I wanted to pass two collections into a function and Perl treats function arguments as a collection, and Perl implicitly flattens collections.

The difference I see, as a Perl newbie only working with it out of necessity, is that having (because you need it because of earlier design choices) more than one way of operating on data structures, violates the principle of least surprise.

Incidentally, I find the -> operator more readable than the explicit dereference ${} stuff:

    printf "First: %d, Name: %s\n", $list_ref->[ 0 ], $hash_ref->{ 'name' };

Perl has always been the butt of write-only jokes within the PL community; just imagine Perl as Rodney Dangerfield complaining that it "gets no respect." APL is of course, the canonical write-only language, but it is completely honest and accepting about it.

I programmed in Perl for CGI in the mid 90s and didn't see anything wrong with it. It was weird, but I had programmed with much worse before then (Lotus Notes Script...whew), so I wasn't really bothered by it. That being said, I see no reason ever to write another line of Perl again.