No. I think that you assume that Perl is hard when it is not. The learning curve for Perl is no more steep than those for Java, C#, Python ... etc. One must first learn how to use data structures in a general sense, and that is the steep learning curve right there. Don't blame the language when the concept itself is what is hard to learn. Likewise, don't fault all XML because you have not bothered to study how the specific XML that you are trying to parse was put together. Again, i really doubt you love Perl as much as you want us to think you do.