My impression of Perl, as someone who wrote two scripts in it twenty years ago and has been on the Internet since the middle-old days, is that it is a language suited to being clever.
This observation is spot on and 100% of the reason why dealing with other people's code is insufferable. After 20 years of coding I can confidently say I'd rather clean out crawlspaces for a living than deal with another "clever" codebase.
