[perigrin]

I'd argue that the community by and large has for at least the last 5 years. Starting in 2005 with Damian Conway's _Perl Best Practices_ and the tools like Perl::Critic that came out of it. Add to that tools like `perltidy` (that was recommended strongly in Damian's book), a strong testing culture (see other threads on HN which discuss the automatic testing of all modules on CPAN), modern changes like 5.12 enabling `strict` and `warnings` pragmas by default. Additionally tools like Moose simplify and reduce the boiler plate associated with traditional areas of Perl's ... shall we say extended obtuse verbosity ... namely Object Oriented programming.

By and large Modern Perl code is strongly encouraged to be readable, maintainable with a sound well engineered basis. If someone is telling you it isn't, they haven't paid attention for half a decade.