90% of Perl's line noise comes from using short cute variable names and trying to cram way too much into way too compressed regexes. There's nothing inherent a

90% of Perl's line noise comes from using short cute variable names and trying to cram way too much into way too compressed regexes. There's nothing inherent about Perl that causes people to use $z instead of $somethingDescriptive. And regexes have for quite some time allowed for insignificant whitespace to comment things in detail. If you comment your regexes and use decent variable names, you solve 98% of the readability problems of Perl, and both of those could be enforced with a linter. But as I said, a lot of the problems come from one liners being slowly expanded. Using single letter var names for anything is fine in a one liner, but not good for long term program legibility or maintance in any language.