Perl goes on step beyond Intercal in that the intrincacies of Perl's syntax and semantics are "global", in the sense that they require you to understand most of the inner workings of the Perl interpreter to fix even the simplest misbehaviour on your programs. Besides that Perl, being 20 years younger than Intercal, and being so popular and overbloated, is *MUCH* bigger than Intercal, and even the process that generates its binary from a set of C files and some libraries written in a restricted Perl is almost impossible to understand in full.
Anyway, here are some tricks that helped me learn enough Perl to write Perl scripts a few lines long, even calling the yucky, hackish, pathologically-object-oriented standard libraries.
eep interactive perldb dump w context vars vocabs ioctl
If you want a pretty language instead, one that is good for solving "real-life", complex problems (in opposition to "purely administrative" problems), take a look at Icon; it only lacks a bit more of interaction with the underlying Unix (sprintf, regexps, bidirectional pipes), but that's being worked on.
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