[tooltalk]

You mean "write-only" language?

I had a lot of junior folks complaining about "un"readability of my Perl codes back when I used to work in finance. There were a lot of seasoned Java and C++ programmer on the business side who didn't have much problem hacking their way around Perl, but most folks on the operational side had less than a few year of shell, Python, PHP. I ended up rewriting their codes for speed, brevity and correctness -- and it drove them crazy.

But I've also seen a fair share of properly functioning, yet incomprehensible Perl codes so I could see why so many are turned off.