Perl looks ugly to novices?

I thought the whole point of Perl was that there were so many ways to code something, there's always a way to make the code look elegant.
From Larry Wall:
Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.
This contrasts languages like Ruby which basically encourage/force you  to do things a specific way.

Just read this quote
I have a pretty major problem with a language where one of the most common variables has the name $_
Except you never have to use $_ in the first place. It's always a choice

In conclusion, people who don't like Perl don't know how to use it.

Stop OP. If you read the wikipedia article at the least, you would have not touched perl. It is Syntactic Meth.

Is you want something clean, and easy to read, but for scripting, use any of the following.

MAWK,mksh,LISP,Lua.

smalltalk is still nice, but I do not know what you need to learn perl. So I choose the ones that cover scriping, that can be compiled, and that the abstracts can be read, and parsed well by the eye.

If you can compile, stick to any asm, C, Haskell, LISP, Ada, Pascal.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to, who will read the code after you, and is this well laid out and EXPLAINED. You are solving problems, not making poetry. So write your code well, and give descriptions and examples of your functions. Comments and README text files exist for a reason.

Join BRAINFUCK or any asm if you want extra optimization. Documentation is still available for the needful.

;tldr
Perl is meth
LISP is math
Haskell is myth.