I always appreciated the expressiveness of perl, and ruby for that matter... however, reading perl you've written a while ago, of even after not writing any for some while is a lot of mental hurdle...
I hear this a lot, but I have gone back to plenty of my old scripts and have no trouble parsing them. This is something I worried about several years ago when writing some fairly hairy code, but it really has not panned out.
I do have trouble reading other people's code sometimes, but that's true in any language. It's easy to get thrown for a loop when someone uses a language feature that you've never seen before.
