I had the same reaction when I first encountered Perl. The non-alphabetics were distracting. When I tried to ignore them, the code made even less sense. After a while I began to "get it" and started thinking in Perl. It was a tough adjustment as I didn't have a C, or even a Unix background. Hashes were easy, list vs. scalar mode tripped me up a few times. Now it all makes some kind of sense. Sometimes it's different on different days...