When I read the perldocs much of it looks write-only. But in keeping with Perl's spirit of "there's more than one way to do it", one can actually write straightforward Perl code that is as understandable as Python.
I'm a Perl fan, but there are some places where it's hard to avoid ugly code. Like collections of complex data structures, especially combined with references. No matter how hard you try, you get messy looking code.
This is exactly when I switched to Python, when I realized that I always had to look up how to dereference pointers to non-trivial objects.
For what it's worth, there's now postfix dereferencing which avoids the whole having to go back and wrap @{ ... } around things.