I appreciate this measured response, but want to make very explicit that I did not mean to criticise you or your advice, much less deny its value to the novice

I appreciate this measured response, but want to make very explicit that I did not mean to criticise you or your advice, much less deny its value to the novice programmer; I certainly apologise if I did so unintentionally. I always enjoy your writings on Perl, even if I sometimes disagree with specific opinion-based recommendations (as is, almost by definition, the prerogative of Perl programmers), and I hope that I didn't seem to be knocking you or them. I was not even disagreeing with this particular advice, just saying that it didn't necessarily establish the attitude of the broader Perl community on punning in variable names. (There always will be code golfers who will value cleverness over maintainability—and there should be; without them we would never have such gems as `[$a => $b]->[$b <= $a]` for `min($a, $b)`.)