Thanks for the reply - I haven't touched Perl in years and it's definitely much more readable now. It looks like a lot of work has gone into making Perl more readable, especially Moose.
The perl code I've seen in the wild generally doesn't look like that though. Is that more an issue of the age of most Perl code? Or are some people still writing 'old fashioned perl' even if it isn't the recommended way anymore?
Part of the problem is that one-off scripts are different than applications. One off scripts don't need to be big or particularly maintainable, but the problem is people get in the habit of writing Perl that way.
So it's complicated.
Also keep in mind that a lot of CPAN modules out there began back in the 1990's and are still being developed today. I know. I am now a maintainer of several, and the code isn't often that pretty.
But this is the benefit of being encouraged to think about elegance of code: one improves.
But one can write amazingly beautiful, clear, and elegant Perl or one can write rubbish (after all good Perl doesn't take much work to maintain). Most of my work is either maintaining rubbish or (I hope) writing nice, maintainable code.
Just to clarify, re-reading this it looks a little confused. The rubbish I maintain is not stuff on CPAN but legacy code inherited from another non-CPAN project. The legacy modules are sometimes annoying in some ways but they are serviceable.
Some of the non-CPAN code I have (the rubbish) is sufficiently unmaintainable that the only way of dealing with it is to refactor with a chain saw and avoid touching it otherwise.
What seems to happen the coming years in Perl 5 (unless the Python language trolls manages to discredit it enough to kill it :-) ) is probably gelling around language [syntax] extensions and Moose going to the Perl core.
But it will still keep backwards compatibility.
(And I write horrible Perl code most days myself, as one line liners. :-) Best damn shell functionality on this planet imho, along with Emacs command line editing.)
The perl code I've seen in the wild generally doesn't look like that though. Is that more an issue of the age of most Perl code? Or are some people still writing 'old fashioned perl' even if it isn't the recommended way anymore?