Writing and reading Perl was meant to feel more like producing and consuming natural language. When in comes to natural language, our ability to use it for practical purposes is a fact, and whether it can be understood rigorously or shoehorned into a logical framework is an academic question. With that in mind, Perl was designed without regard for whether the everyday user of the language could understand the logic beneath it. All that mattered was that people could learn to produce meaningful chunks of code and understand code produced by others who wished to be understood. Unlike any natural language, of course, there was a standard implementation, so there
was a logic underlying it all, but being able to pull apart a piece of code and explain how the parts worked together was considered to be of secondary importance to being able to successfully produce working LOC.
You even saw "folk theories" about how the language worked, which were valid and useful to the extent that they helped people produce and understand a certain subset of valid Perl. These folk theories would trip up people like me who expected them to be mathematical truths that could be combined with each other in novel ways, while more Perl-attuned people knew that this kind of analysis was as hazardous as assuming that fingers fing, or that "black big dog" is as valid as "big black dog." There are always new rules to learn and more precise versions of rules you thought you already knew, and ideally you would end up following the rules without knowing them [1]. Ideally, the better you got at reading and writing Perl, the less you thought about those things, just like we study rules of grammar as children while we're learning to stop writing incomprehensible crap like "dog run big I saw," and the better we get at writing the more we realize that the "rules" of grammar are mostly wrong and beside the point anyway. You didn't expect the sysadmin producing reams of working Perl in the next cube to be able to explain what a reference was just like you didn't expect a master advertising copy writer to be able to diagram a sentence for you.
In my attempt to learn Perl the way you would learn math, or the way you would learn a traditional programming language that was designed to be used by logically combining completely understood parts, I discovered that there were some people who understood Perl and could confidently recombine pieces into new idioms and know what they would do without trying them, but in the Perl community it was considered okay that these extraordinary people were a small minority, just like we don't worry that there isn't a professor of linguistics standing by when you order a meal in a restaurant.
Personally, I found it to be a fascinating abomination. An abomination because it flies in the face of how I think good reliable software should be written, and fascinating because it seemed to work surprisingly well.
[1] https://twitter.com/MattAndersonNYT/status/77200275722200268...