For most people the thing that is hard to understand about Perl scripts is the regexp code. However, regexps looks more or less the same in any language. But, the thing is, most Perl scripts process things such as log files and similar data. Which makes the scripts highly dependent on regexps, hence hard to read and maintain. The same thing goes for any code that uses a lot of regexps.

Actual Perl code, disregarding regexp, certainly isn't anymore difficult to comprehend than code in most other languages.

In education AI is the hottest topic ever. Mostly teachers think that it will spell the doom for any kind of home work. Which might very well be true.