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.