It was a joke, take it easy. With that said, perl has a multitude of ways to shoot yourself in the foot and future maintainers in the face. Notably, the obscure tricks perl allows you to write that are difficult to read in the future but seem clever when you write them. I've written enough perl to know they exist but thankfully forgotten all of them so I can't give a good example. I just remember something about $_ being interesting at times.