I wrote a ton of Perl 5 and also found it very intuitive and powerful. I think the notion that Python is "more readable" is true, but also less useful of a metric than it would seem. Python is still gibberish to a new coder and requires training and experience to master. Perl requires somewhat more effort to acclimate to, but ultimately is much more expressive and much closer to real-world software engineering problems. Once the incremental effort is made, Perl is (or at least was) a better Python.