I can't see any argument in there. 'meant to express programmer intent'? What does that mean? Basing programming languages on mathematical notation or something else would also of course be 'meant to express programmer intent'.
Why are natural languages a better foundation for programming languages than, for example, maths notation or calculi? Everyone in the Perl community seems to think they just intuitively know it is, but can't explain why.
When you're speaking to another programmer, explaining what a bit of your code is trying to do, do you speak in mathematical notation? I doubt it. I don't think even mathematicians do that.
If you want a well-expressed explaination for why Perl's approach is a good idea, you should read what Larry Wall has written about it. All I can really say is that it worked really well for me and my team for many years. We rarely misunderstood each other's intent, even though our code reviews were mostly just reading commit diffs.
Think of it as a commenting or documentation system that's also interpreted by the language. Comments that can never get out of date.
If you think that human-readable comments and documentation are not useful... then I'm not going to try to convince you that you would benefit from perl's syntactic flexibility. But surely you recognize that there are some people that like documentation, useful comments, and informative variable names.
Why are natural languages a better foundation for programming languages than, for example, maths notation or calculi? Everyone in the Perl community seems to think they just intuitively know it is, but can't explain why.