A good, advanced Perl programmer isn't writing code that's hard to understand for beginners to the language and programming novices. They write advanced solutions to advanced problems. It's those solutions and the problems they address which are difficult for beginners to understand. That is the case for any language.

A one line conditional statement isn't hard for me (a beginner to both programming AND Perl) to recognized because I've learned and seen examples of them in use. Other than being cool names, I had no idea what implode or explode were supposed to do in PHP (two of the very first functions you learn in the language). One step further, imagine going into a Python forum and asking "Hey, what does '>>>>' mean? I keep seeing it in my book?" I'd be laughed out yet that's a question I had when first researching what programming language I wanted to learn.

These are small particulars that you have to look past and instead ask: "What is this language's approach to solving problems and is it similar to the way I think or want to work."