When he explains how Perl handles an array passed as an argument to a function:

    my @list = ('b', 'c');
    test('a', @list, 'd');

Which ends up flatting the @list array into the argument list and printing 'a', 'b', 'c', most Perl programmers defend the language saying that the author just doesn't understand Perl, and that's how things are done in the language since forever. The response is basically a RTFM.

If you really wanted to send the whole list as single argument to the function, you should have sent an array reference, like this:

    test('a', \@list, 'd');

Perl programmers say that if you took a minute to understand the language, you should have known this. However, what they don't realize is that Perl gives you ambiguous hints about this all the time. For example, the built in push function doesn't seem to follow this logic:

    push(@list, "item2", "item2");

This function knows perfectly that the list is a single argument and the other ones are the items to push into the list. You don't have to pass a reference to the array to make it work.

The push function works like this because it uses an obscure feature called function prototypes. Which is rarely mentioned in any tutorial.

When a Perl newbie sees the push function, it's more than reasonable to think that passing arrays as function arguments will work as in any other language. When they find what really happens, it can be very frustrating, specially because Perl won't give you any error whatsoever. This is one of the reasons why Perl is so difficult to learn.