Little syntax error: for hashes, you would say:

    my %hash = (
    # your key/values
    );

and not,

    my %hash = {
   # your key/values
    };

I think that may be one of the problems people have with Perl - the syntax gets a little whacky and it's hard, sometimes, to wrap your mind around Perl-style references.

My personal way to solve this is to almost exclusively use references in complex data structures, so:

		my $hashref = { 
		another_hashref => { 
			key_name => [qw(
				value
				is
				an 
				array_ref
			)], 
		},
	};

Is a hashref, that contains another hashref, which contains an array ref. Easy to bring up the 3rd thingy in the arrayref:

    print $hashref->{another_hashref}->{key_name}->[2]; #an

This should be somewhat palatable to do actually, if you're slinging JSON all day.

Oh I was sure the syntax was ok in both forms. I'm guessing it's a GLR revision. It's indeed better to to reserve {} for scalar containers.

Notice how in Perl 6 you get a nice error message:

    $ perl6 -e 'my %h = { foo => "bar" };'
    Potential difficulties:
        Useless use of hash composer on right side of hash assignment;
        did you mean := instead?
        at -e:1
        ------> my %h = { foo => "bar" }⏏;

That's good, because in Perl 5, it does DWIM, but that sometimes means returning undef, which - erm, thanks Perl ;)