Perl and PHP are ugly not because of how they look on the page but because of their bodged-together semantics, with magical variables that do magical things, keywords that don't mean what you think they mean, etc.

If I had a word to describe Ruby it would be, fittingly, "kawaii". Like a girl from a third-rate anime whom you think is adorable as a teenager, then you get older, grow some taste and it dawns on you that her nose is in completely the wrong part of her face.

It's all relative. Joe Armstrong himself said he made engineering compromises in the design of erlang because he was concerned about software useful for the telco industry, not an academic exercise.

Most of the "sequential erlang" syntax is ugly as hell, from the various separators (statement, case, function) to the (downright dreadful) records syntax or the function reference syntax (both anonymous functions and reference to named functions are pretty bad).

The language itself, as in the model and the underlying concepts and ideas, are generally neat, but the syntax isn't when compared to Haskell or even MLs derivatives.

Aside from the literal bit syntax, that part is beautiful (for the most part, the complex modifier atoms still weird me out)

All python code looks about the same due to it's structured nature. Because of this, the language appears more "elegant". I'm a devout PHP coder, and build on custom frameworks to do whatever it is that I need. I have some pretty big applications as well. My preference is entirely for free-form languages due to the fact that I can control elegance and readability. It may require more effort, but it is certainly doable. In fact, I'd like python a whole lot more if I wasn't forced into the structured paradigm.

In short, lazy coders make ugly code despite the language.

The way you describe python as a language of structured constraint is pretty much the opposite of my understanding of programming language "elegance", with lisp or haskell being some kind of ultimate to aspire to.