Never met someone that really knows Perl well that thinks the syntax is a big problem or it's a "write only" language. It's all people who were scared off before they saw the light. Almost always the same with Lisp, vim/emacs, etc. Anything that's too foreign looking causes fear and then hatred for the fear it caused.
Read it carefully: There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.
Nowhere does it say that the people doing the complaining are always the people who use it. I'd guess that the people hating lisp (or perl, php, etc) are ones who were told that it's great by someone who does use it, and who then tried it and formed a different personal opinion.
How can you be sure of that?
Each language has found it core market:
C++ is the leading language in the game industry.
C is used for embed software
Java is the everyone's language and with it awesome j2ee stack is becoming the de facto language for programming entreprise application.
And the list goes ...
So as one said, hating a language is imature.
You don't like it, don't use it.
I've been using C++ professionally and personally for a good ten years now, and aside from compilation speed, I don't really have any complaints about it. Use it properly, use Boost, and it's quite decent.
I only wish it had some of the sexy features of other languages, but C++0x (or whatever it's called now) is addressing a lot of that.
It's really hard to take the things that C++ does well and do it significantly better. I think D has largely proven that.
There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bjarne_Stroustrup