[cr0sh]

Perl could've been readable - nothing in the language prevents you from writing readable code. The problem was two-fold, imho:

1) regex was treated like the primary way to do things - even when it wasn't necessarily called for - at the expense of readability (and Perl supported it so well)

2) sysadmins

The two combined together (and possibly the fact that it was the early days of commercial internet service) led to the idea that anything done in Perl was destined to look like "line noise" to actual SWEs.

/just how I saw it...