I've written a complex ruby library and then ported it to perl. Since both languages are basically the same in their capabilities the port was very straightforward. I know both languages fairly well, but if I go back to the ruby version I can read it just fine, while if I look at the perl version it looks like a morass of symbol soup. The language has so much unnecessary syntactic noise that even what I would consider well-written Perl code that I've personally designed and written is still too difficult to read.<p>Also, from my personal experience, in general the average quality of Perl code I've seen, whether it's CPAN libraries or code at I see at work, is much less than the average quality Python and Ruby code I see, which is more of a community problem than a language one, although Perl being the way it is seems to attract a certain class of developers I would rather not have to work with.