[kstrauser]

I'm there with you. Taken to the extreme, this is why we don't use assembler for everything. I mean, it's Turing complete, right? And you can write readable assembler, true? And yet, we don't, largely because it's much easier to express large systems in other languages that are easier to write, read, and reason about.

OK, so Perl isn't assembler. Still, it's a lot easier to write unreadable code in Perl than it is in some of its contemporary languages. You don't have to, sure. You could write clean, pretty Perl code. I know, because I've seen it. But in my experience, that definitely wasn't the common case.