> Perl's syntax is designed to be more close to natural language.
s/natural/English/. Some languages can be parsed by computer without problems. For example, simple 15kb C program can parse 100% of technical text in Esperanto, 98% of technical text in Ukrainian (my native language), 84% of technical text in Russian, and so on. Not so simple parser can parse more than 100% of text, i.e. it can fix errors in text.
For me, shell is much closer to my native language than perl or SQL.
PS. AFAIK, there is no natural language in the wild nature. :-/ All human languages are artificial.
I think bad_user might be referring to Larry Wall's post Natural Language Principles in Perl
Both Lisp and Perl are in the same camp ... I could hardly read an algorithm written in them before learning and actively working with them.
Either way, I'm tired of languages that can only be extended by adding functions. Declarative APIs require much more than that.