Perl can be written to be prettier than Python or uglier than anything else imaginable.

Even well-written Perl is noisier than Python.

my $txn = $store->getTxnGroup()->getTxn($txn_id);
txn = store.getTxnGroup().getTxn(txn_id)

Or:

my $ids = [ map { $_->{ id } } @$txns ];
ids = [i['id'] for i in txns]

I still love Perl, but can only think of one place where it's prettier than Python - that's quoting.

I've worked on both good and bad Perl. Perl's sigils are not an issue; neither are Lisp's parentheses or Python's whitespace. These things cease to annoy once you spend some time with the language.

The reason there's a lot of bad Perl is the reason there's a lot of bad PHP: both languages enable beginning programmers to get things done.