That's interesting, because defining an AoH or HoA in Perl is almost identical to how you would do it in Javascript, which is to say it looks a lot like JSON.

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 };

Given, using array and hash references with the built-in push,pop,shift,unshift,keys,values and each used to require some annoying dereferencing that could be confusing.

Do you still find that confusing?