I haven't used Perl much, but my impression it is much easier to learn if you already know awk and sed - his original target was people who knew awk and sed well but were running into limitations using the two as separate tools. However the language quickly spread to people who don't know either of the previous tools and then it is difficult to learn.

Just like human dialects, across the same main language, :)

I'm gonna read your links but I assume that 90% of the programming population doesn't grasp linguistic approaches to representing knowledge and logic (not saying this as a superiority thing, more as a cultural gap too wide)

I'm sorry, but both of those studies are a joke. They are taking novices who can't program, and are asking them to perform basic programming tasks in languages that they haven't learned. They are essentially testing how steep the initial learning curve is when you first see a language.

A far more important measure is something like function points per month of developer time. See page 49 of https://www.ifpug.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IYSM.-Thirt... for some data on that. ADA 95 did pretty well, around 11. Perl beat it with 15.

Of course that measure isn't perfect. Excel trounced both with over 30. But Excel is only appropriate for some kinds of projects.