Writing readable perl is easy, just code it like it's LISP.
Granted, he was working with it in AI/bioinformatics.
One of my classmates who moved into the IT/management side of things historically got much quicker responses from the dev team whenever he volunteered to code something, as he was always going to do it in perl.
Perl with list comprehensions do look a bit like line noise...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_lang...
... but not really worse than most other languages there.
By contrast, its "higher order functions" are useful but relatively speaking, read like someone shook a box of leftover syntax all over them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_function#Perl
Even though C# has a seizure in the middle, Perl still seems the clunkiest.