Perl and Bash are only "error-prone and unintuitive" in the way that woodworking is. If you have no education into how it all works, and you just take a saw or drill to a bunch of wood and try to hack together a table, the result will be terrible. You need to read something that explains how it works, then practice it and make some mistakes to learn from. The same thing is true of C, C++, Lisp, Haskell, all sorts of languages. Nobody just uses them perfectly on the first try.