I am wondering why it is as it is. I think it may be because of perls abundance of short cryptic symbols that people feel somehow "proud" to 1) know what "while(<>){print if($.==2 || $& && !$x++); $.=0 if (/^--+$/)}" does and 2) to make it even shorter. Because with )(!§&/$?(=)% with hell a lot of meanings you could write entire perl scripts based on special characters.

A good example is http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.beginners/2009/01/msg106... that i just found googling for perl one liners. The OP want's to know what this line does, the first answer is "you can make it even shorter!". Somewhat explains what i try to say ;)

Surely there is a lot of clean perl code out there but from my experience at customers (i'm consultant) what happens in-house in some development departments looks very very very different. Then again i've seen a lot broken, half-tested and unmaintained CPAN modules as well.