Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm not sure why every language needs to be useful as a scripting tool. "Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible." -- Larry Wall One of the reasons why I switched from Java to Perl. I didn't feel that easy things were easy in Java, and I don't run into enough hard problems on a daily basis to justify the verbosity and masochism involved.
On one hand, I'm happy you found something more productive. On the other, I've spent a good chunk of time just reading other people's code, and I've come to appreciate really straight forward verbose code. So I am a bit biased against the Perl I've seen, since it is generally not written with ease of understanding as a priority.
That said, too much verbosity can introduce the same problem of unreadability by making important things harder to identify. There's an important balance between verbosity and terseness that should always be considered.