[stevan_little]

Just so you know, there is somewhat of a movement afoot in Perl these days. Many of us long term Perl programmers know well the dangers of TIMTOWTDI. So we have created TIMTOWTDI-BSCINABTE (pronounced TimToady Bicarbonate) and stands for "But Sometimes Consistency Is Not A Bad Thing Either". This has come specifically out of the Moose community and basically pushes to try and spread consistent best practices throughout the community.

I think the issue you encounter is a combination of isolation (the more involved you are in the community, the more you are exposed to best-practices and idiomatic Perl) and the quality of some of the older Perl documentation and books. In some of these older documents there was an emphasis put on "cleverness through TIMTOWTDI" which really had a damaging effect on some people (read: the people whose code you have inherited).

Perl is an extremely flexible language, which in the right hands can be very powerful. However, as Uncle Ben said, with great power comes great responsibility. I personally would rather my language require a little more self discipline from me 90% of the time, so that in the remaining 10% of the time I can hack some really crazy shit to get the job done.