[kbenson]

One person's "Magic sequence in perl doing 6 things unintuitively" is another person's "I actually know Perl, and the standard functions being used here, so this is nothing special".

Comments are good, but what's aceptable as a comment is entirely subjective to someone's competence in the language in question.

For example, if you can't look at a Schwartzian Transform[1] in Perl and understand what it's doing, if not immediately than after a moment or two of looking at the steps, then you do not actually know how to program in Perl, you're just muddling your way through. Nothing in the transform is special, and if you are confused by anything in it that's the equivalent of being confused by arrays and simple array syntax in C. A comment of "optimized sort on computed X attribute" should be more than enough, but to anyone slightly unfamiliar with Perl it will seem woefully inadequate.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwartzian_transform