no doubt its fashionable to think "perl == line noise == bad"

however, there are certain sub languages (slangs) where the use of punctuation chars as operators is very helpful, of course regex is the most compelling where the code is parsing one char at a time

  my regex url {
    ^                                # Start of line
    [<http> s? '://']                # Match http or https
    ['www.' ]?                       # Optional www.
    [<[\w\-]>+ '.' ]+                # One or more domain segments
    <[a..z]> ** 2..6                 # TLD, 2 to 6 lowercase letters
    [ '/' <[\w\-./?%&=]>* ]?         # Optional path/query
    $                                # End of line
  }

imo raku has improved the situation a lot by introducing "regex 2.0" with deep support for unicode and with built in grammars that can work smoothly with regex

Ahh not sure I agree. The reputation for being unreadable is pretty well deserved. It didn't happen for no reason.

ok - I agree that there was a culture of golfing and obscurity in some sections of the perl coder base

it was inevitable that a simpler language - Python - would take the big slice of scripters who wanted something easier to learn and to read

I'm sad that perl no longer has a credible niche for script level coders who want to learn a more powerful and more expressive language than Python ...