There were programming envs that were easy to pick up in contemporary times. Hypercard is one that's often especially-fondly referenced as a non-traditional-programmer friendly example. Basic was much less arcane syntax-wise too. It's been a LONG time since I used Pascal but I also remember it being simpler to pick up.

But Perl specifically came out of a fairly arcane sysadmin-y corner of the world full of other already-arcane tools like awk and sed. And those were a decade older, but by the late 80s they weren't the only thing around to compare to.