This is why I stopped using Perl. I think this

  entire_file = open('file').read()

is how it should look like. You can comprehend it without knowing the language.

The only reason why you find the Perl hard to read is because you don't know Perl. I find Spanish hard to read. Why? Because I don't know the language. That doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with Spanish as a language, though, it just means I don't know it.

Two points:

1) He said - "you can comprehend it without knowing the language" and you responded with "well, of course you can't read it - you don't know it!". The argument is specifically about being able to read a language without knowing what % ! and $ stand for.

2) Equating a programming language to a human language as if proficiency or deficiency in the first implies something about the second is really a bad idea. Human languages evolve naturally without a designer who can make a language less or more readable. For a programming language, there is always a designer, and readability by a person "unskilled in the art" is a major category by which the language is judged.

Don't give up on languages because of cosmetics... find a better reason!

Think this is probably easiest to understand....

  my $entire_file = slurp 'file';