You spent 4 years of learning Perl, 4 years in which you likely also massively improved your skills as a programmer, regardless of the Perl angle. Then you went to Python, bringing in your programmer experience, probably started off with a good book and had a much happier time.
So, do challenge yourself and ponder how much of that come from having spent 4 years programming, and how much from actual differences in the languages?
Obviously developers (which I am not), and people with more discipline and structure, and write eminently readable and maintainable perl code - but as my day job was network engineering, I was just looking for the lowest cost path to get the job done.
I really did love CPAN though.
If it was the access and assignment semantics, the normal case is also fairly straightforward; use curly braces for hash/dict keys, square brackets for array indices.
E.g.
my %data = (
foo => [
{ bar => 10, baz => 12 },
{ bar => 20, baz => 13 },
{ bar => 30, baz => 14 },
],
);
print $data{foo}[2]{bar}; # 30
push $data{foo}, { bar => 40, baz => 15 };
Do you still find that confusing?
data ={}
data['foo']= [
{'bar':10,'baz':12},
{'bar':20,'baz':13},
{'bar':30,'baz':14}
]
print data['foo'][2]['bar']
data['foo'].append({'bar':40,'baz':15})
for x in data['foo']:
print x['bar']
Anyways, it was just a personal story told as well as I could remember it.