I mostly agree with you, though I do think Perl is genuinely harder to read than many other languages. Perl was often my goto for scripts before I learned Ruby (which has many glorious perl-isms in it even if most rubyists nowadays don't know or want to acknowledge that :-D ), and even looking back at some of my own code and knowing what it does, I have to read it a lot slower and more carefully than most other langs. Perl to me feels wonderfully optimized for writing, sometimes at the expense of reading. I love Perl's power and expressiveness, especially the string processing libs, and while I appreciate the flexibility in how many different ways there are to do things, it does mean that Perl code written by someone else with different approaches can sometimes be difficult to grok. For my own scripts I don't care about any of those issues and I often optimize for writing anyway, but there are plenty of applications where I would recommend against Perl, despite my affection for it.

And yes agree, people should read the camel book!