I hear this claim that Perl is obfuscated and difficult to maintain quite often. It doesn't have to be. You can write Perl in a way similar to C or C++. You can use subroutines and objects if you want, you can indent your text if you want. The $ indication for a scalar variable, @ for an array, etc. actually make the language a bit easier to understand in many ways. Rather than having to develop a linked list routine in C, you can just use an array, hash, or complex data structure to store whatever you need to store. It's simple and elegant.
I know people get a bit confused by regular expressions, but with a bit of practice, they are easy to use as well.
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