Perl is only as scary as its coder can make it.

I've never understood why so many self-declared programmers are so eager to brag that they can't understand a programming language which is, frankly, not really that complicated.

I don't particularly like, say, lisp, but I can in fact understand lisp programs or write them if I need to.

I admit I also don't understand the characterization of perl as a write-only language, although I can make a guess about how it's because a lot of perl programs have many embedded regular expressions, and, like many programmers, I'm not particularly thrilled by things like sigils, and I don't find the syntax particularly good.

You are right that it's not that complicated, but like any language that I'm not interested in mastering, the amount of learning that it would take to create idiomatic perl is not an investment I'm willing to make.

And, given that none of the perl scripts that I was tasked with modifying were very long, I have always treated it, rather than a write-only language, as a read-only language; when someone hands me something in perl that needs to be updated, it gets recoded in something else.

And, for anything but a throwaway one-liner, it shouldn't be made scary at all.