As many others already said, it's probably not the TIMTOWTDI that's different to other languages. The difference IMHO is the culture of celebrating that kind of freedom, that scares other people.

And it's a pity that even in todays colorful times most source code has to be shown without syntax highlighting, newspapers, books and even blogs mostly show it black/white.

If there would be more syntax highlighting then people would see how much more expressive and more readable Perl code can be compared to other languages which just don't have the syntactic richness to express different things differently and therefore are not able to color them accordingly.