You know, when I look at Russian Cyrillic, or Greek letters, it looks like squiggles. I've never studied it, so I have no means to relate it to sounds, let alone meanings.

So, when people say, "I can't read Perl", it only tells me they haven't studied it.

And if people choose to be vocal about their own ignorance, saying "Perl is unreadable!", that's saying a lot more about them than it does about Perl.

As far as I can tell, millions of people speak Greek and Russian. I'm not one of them, and that's ok. I don't keep saying "Russian is impossible", simply because I personally don't know it.

If it matters, I've seen some pretty impenetrable Python, Ruby, and Java code. And I even pretend to know those languages at least in passing.