Regexes support whitespace and comments, and can easily be composed. But I agree that an effort needs to be made to write legible Perl code. "Perl Best Practices" is required reading for any professional Perl programmer.
Aye, you know you're starting to reach expert level once you understand the parts of that book which should be ignored.
for OP: Perl is a rich and deep language. It's as or more comptetent as exactly the same things as ruby and python (although pythons maths, and keeping management happy libraries are better, perl's async and systems wrangling )support is better. It is more permissive than you would want in some circumstances, but in my experiencing running a competent perl team with supportive management is a pleasure.
