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.