[kbenson]

Well, that's half PHP's problem. The other half is that it had very little coherent design in the beginning, which resulted in idiosyncratic an confusing syntax. It focused on a few things Perl did, while ignoring the important context they were housed within (for one, the whole idea of context as Perl implements it, for another being consistent within your own rules).

Perl, as confusing as it can seem, has fairly consistent rules that it follows. Learning those and keeping them in mind will generally let you intuit how something is expected to work.