Except that it's not, because there are many good alternatives to Perl that have equivalent, if not greater, power, and require very little memorization. You can be up and running with a full understanding of the syntax for most flavors of Lisp in a few hours...

Actually, Feynman had exactly this criticism of the way biology was taught; that the students memorized way too many things that they could just look up(and this was pre-Google, mind you!)