The "line noise" aspect of Perl never bothered me, because I'm already a heavy user of regexes. The cause of my misery was Perl's "There Is More Than One Way To Do It."
TIMTOWTDI is what I loved about Perl and the reason I found the transition to Ruby so enjoyable.
For what it's worth, non-alphanumeric Ruby is Turing-complete: https://ideone.com/55WtMM
Yes, there’s still some symbols, but nowhere near as many.