Readability (or maintainability) is a bugaboo not limited to Perl. (If you're primarily concerned about the ugliness of dereferencing, brother hand me a hammer!)

Any language that lets you choose your own names (and indentation, line breaks, et cetera) will allow you to write hard-to-maintain code. Any language that provides more than one way to accomplish something allows coders to pick, occasionally, the worst approach.

Conversely, any language that promises to make your code beautiful, expressive, efficacious, and easily maintained is either lying, hiding something, or suitable only for one sort of person doing one sort of task. (Some people hate Perl's use of sigils to denote variable "type" and "context". I like it. Some people think Ruby is eminently readable. I dislike the sigils used to denote types of variables.)

It's my opinion that syntax issues are less important than good programming habits (though there are some people who swear by LISP's postfix, and others who like indirect object notation, Larry forgive them!). That's not to say that certain syntaxes don't make things easier than others -- and you may find that another language fits you better than the others.

That's fine -- but be aware that readability and maintainability have a great deal to do with your habits and knowledge.