I never used Perl, but I use Ruby where people might have used Perl before. (Small one-off scripts or simple automation stuff)
People often attack the appearance and readability of Perl code ("write-only" code), but lot's of Ruby code I come across has the exact same problem, except that people seem to love adding 4 or 5 extra layers of abstraction on top of that.
One can write totally incomprehensible code in any language if clean, readable code is not a priority.
And the opposite is true, too, of course. I have seen some fairly messy Python code and some marvelously clean Perl code. And I am fairly certain that over time, some people have written beautiful PHP code and ugly Lisp code.
In my humble experience, it is not so much a property of the programming language as it is of the programmer(s).
People often attack the appearance and readability of Perl code ("write-only" code), but lot's of Ruby code I come across has the exact same problem, except that people seem to love adding 4 or 5 extra layers of abstraction on top of that.