Yes, I definitely agree that Perl is harder to learn than Python. My point was that people may not have the time or interest to learn Perl, and so when they see Perl code that they do not understand, they blame it on the language instead of their own lack of knowledge.

Perl has a very rich and powerful and expressive grammar. It takes a good bit of effort to learn all of it. Python has opted for a grammer that is much more simple. That definitely has its benefits. For me personally, I feel constrained when writing Python code due to its lack of expressiveness.