[tadzik_]

> Imagine spending your whole afternoon trying to dig what "($fc) = /^(.)/" does; a maintainer's nightmare

Why are you maintaining Perl code without knowing any Perl though? This syntax is obvious to anyone who went through the trouble of following the basic tutorial.

It's a language you need to learn before using it. It's unfamiliar, but not unreadable.

> It's an active struggle to make Perl code readable and it not turning into a mess

Are you speaking from experience? I don't find that to be the case.

I don't understand Haskell, but that's because I never bothered to learn it. Should I say it's a crap language just because I do not understand the basic bits right off the bat?

There are good reasons to dislike Perl (I have my own good reasons, having worked with Perl professionally for close to 10 years), but the syntax is really not one of its real problems.