Transitioning to Perl was hard, but after about a year I grew to have some respect for it.
I have come to respect Perl more, from a Common Lisp perspective.
Both Common Lisp and Perl are about code compression. Common Lisp enables you to compress the complex things into tiny pieces of code. Perl enables you to compress the common things into tiny pieces of code.
i would argue against calling a high level of freedom to formally express abstractions as... 'code compression'. the latter is certainly a sideffect of the former, but the goal is not code compression per se.