Actually this has been hashed (I say, I say, that's a joke there, boy) out pretty thoroughly on the language list. The braces are neccessary because otherwise anonymous hash constructors seem to have no syntactic justification, and we need the brackets for anonymous array constructors. Plus there are strong historical reasons at work.

As for Larry's braces fetish, this is absolutely not true. Having designed a few mini languages myself, I can tell you that there isn't anything else to use. Braces already mean code, parens mean args, brackets mean array ref, and angles are ugly, so filehandles got the diamond and hashes got the braces because in early Perl it was pretty clear what they meant. The only reason Larry seems to have a braces fetish is that alot of the Apocalypses have dealt with blocks - closure, special CAPITAL blocks, switch statements, embedded code.

Light a man a fire, he's warm for a day. Catch a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life. - Terry Pratchet