One liners are not necessarily part of a codebase; one might use them for text processing on the fly. An argument "against readability" is culture. For sysadmi

One liners are not necessarily part of a codebase; one might use them for text processing on the fly. An argument "against readability" is culture. For sysadmins, Perl is a well-known language; it's not unreadable¹. Note that the same applies to Bash, and Bash scripts are still popular. This doesn't imply that Perl/Bash scripts should be universally used, but that within a certain culture, they make perfect sense. ¹=when talking about oneliners