Being a pioneer in using Perl in a computer science department that was grounded heavily in C and Java (with the occasional foray into Lisp or assembler), I was hit with the inherent sloppiness of Perl thing a lot. I eventually started insisting on being able to reply to people via email. It went a little something like this.

Your argument          is wrong.
My     argument
Is
    Right.
Perl is as readable as poetry.
Your
Just
Not            A
      Poet.
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Crude, but it usually got the point across. Languages are never inherently readable, the writer of a document creates readability vis a vie their own personal writing style. Some people have a hard time understanding poetry, but should that mean English is inherently unreadable? A child might not be able to forge a grammatically accurate sentence, does that mean their language is difficult to understand?

What it comes down to is this: there are programmers who know how to write code for other people to read, and programmers who don't. You could write complicated code in any language without ever creating a new line because (generally) the compiler doesn't care. Perl just extends that.

Perl isn't an unreadable language, it just has a very understanding interpreter.