Im with you on this for sure. All too often programmers with a poor understanding of Perl label idiomatic and efficient, and elegant Perl structures with "cleverness", when in fact what they are really saying "you wrote something im too lazy to understand so it must be bad". And actually the first code is not the same as the second in various subtle ways, starting with the fact that it performs many more opcodes that the one following, and thus is not going to be as fast (perl bugs aside).

Bad cleverness is writing a cache system for something that doesnt need to be cached, or using some funky algorithm when a plain array would do. Its not about using the language expressively.