It's one of those never ending tradeoffs. The premise of the parent comment strikes a chord with me.
We necessarily can't do terse and readable. To be terse enough we need to encode. Encode is just another way to say obfuscate, in this context anyway.
I wouldn't necessarily agree Perl asks for a programmer to write bad code (saying this as someone who left Perl because he was fed up with write-only code). I'd phrase it as Perl readily facilitates bad code.
We necessarily can't do terse and readable. To be terse enough we need to encode. Encode is just another way to say obfuscate, in this context anyway.
I wouldn't necessarily agree Perl asks for a programmer to write bad code (saying this as someone who left Perl because he was fed up with write-only code). I'd phrase it as Perl readily facilitates bad code.