Perl syntax is actually fairly mainstream. Some of the lexical conventions of Perl a bizarre, to be sure, but quite consistent and manageable once you get used to them. The camel book. It's too interested in grinding the axe of there being more than one way of doing things, so there isn't a good body of excellent, consistent style that every Perl programmer reads. If you go through a large body of Perl code written by a good programmer, you'll see that it is quite possible to write very good programs in perl, which is the most you can ask of any language.
All languages support terrible programming.