"Honestly, that sounds like someone that didn't bother to learn what's actually going" - Yes, exactly! I never learned what was going on. I pinged our JAPH that was kind of my mentor, and asked how he had ever grokked it - and his answer was, he hadn't - he just yanked his template code each time as well.
The point I'm trying to make is not that I'm a good or knowledgeable developer (neither of which I am, despite having written tens of thousands of lines of perl) - but that the core essence of Python, is that people can use it quickly and profitably without being one. The cognitive hurdle to start using objects in python is tiny - and, once you get that - a lot of the stuff that you would hope works, just does. The language is very friendly to novice coders, and it's lack of implicit (for the most part) actions avoids a lot of unclear side effect.
For more complex projects, things like decorators and generators and type-hints, which are advanced, are available if you need them - but you can go a long way (sometimes forever) without ever touching them - that's not the case with simple data structures - you pretty much need to start working with HoA in perl if you want to do complex things, and I know people who have used perl for the better part of a decade, who have never done so - and were blocked from doing more interesting things.
That saddens me. It's not actually that complicated, but I think Perl's usage numbers have degraded enough that unless you're frequenting one of the online spots where those knowledgeable about the language gather, you're unlikely to encounter them in the wild anymore, and thus aren't getting a useful explanation.
The simple answer that probably would have solved almost all your problems is that you can use the reference syntax for defining things and it will look like and function the same as JavaScript 95% or more of the time, and the only time you'll need to do anything is when passing it to something that expects an actual array or hash. I mean, you can get away with taking JSON and changing colons into fat arrows and booleans into 0 and 1 and it will just work as a Perl data structure as is like 99.99% of the time. Data structure manipulation works similarly as well for the most part.
Ha, I always wondered how long it would take for me to repeat a conversation here with someone! I figured it was only a matter of time. Now I know how much. :)
The point I'm trying to make is not that I'm a good or knowledgeable developer (neither of which I am, despite having written tens of thousands of lines of perl) - but that the core essence of Python, is that people can use it quickly and profitably without being one. The cognitive hurdle to start using objects in python is tiny - and, once you get that - a lot of the stuff that you would hope works, just does. The language is very friendly to novice coders, and it's lack of implicit (for the most part) actions avoids a lot of unclear side effect.
For more complex projects, things like decorators and generators and type-hints, which are advanced, are available if you need them - but you can go a long way (sometimes forever) without ever touching them - that's not the case with simple data structures - you pretty much need to start working with HoA in perl if you want to do complex things, and I know people who have used perl for the better part of a decade, who have never done so - and were blocked from doing more interesting things.