That's what they said about Lisp and Perl.

I can't tell whether you're just being tongue-in-cheek, or perfectly serious. I hope the former.

Little of both, really. I actually think Lisp is beautiful, although it can be difficult to read. As for Perl...

http://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol3_2/tpj0302-0012.html

No excuse.

I don't think you're supposed to be able to get used to obfuscated anything. By that metric, C is equally unreadable: http://ioccc.org/

I've seen very readable perl code, although I won't use that to make sweeping generalizations about the entire language.

To be fair, I never said C was pretty. I have no real problem with Perl aside from its overabundance of punctuation.