I think you are both making a basic mistake here: You say you learned Perl after learning other languages. Thus you expected it to work the same, and it didn't. As a first language, you don't have any pre-conceived opinions about how things should work, and thus this conflict never happens.
You could argue that learning the Perl quirks before anything else would be a problem later on, but I think that's about as bogus as the argument that learning BASIC is somehow harmful. Of course, I didn't learn Perl as a first language, but I have sort of an instinctive feel that it has a bunch of features that make it nice to beginners. Being more forgiving about syntax than many other languages is one.