I think Perl-esque is apt, but that's because I've done quite a bit of Perl and think the syntax concerns are overblown. Once you get past the sigils on the variables Perl's syntax is generally pretty straightforward, albeit with a few warts in places like almost every language. The other area where people complained about Perl's opaqueness was the regular expressions, which most languages picked up anyway because people realized just how useful they are.