That's unfortunate. I try to keep my code (no matter what language, Perl included) as readable and tidy as possible for the sake of those reading the code in the future (myself included). While creatively stringing an incomprehensible stream of punctuation marks into a usable program is fun, I'm with you in agreeing that such coding styles should be avoided in anything that's not a one-off mental exercise.

That said, too much verbosity can introduce the same problem of unreadability by making important things harder to identify. There's an important balance between verbosity and terseness that should always be considered.