I remember seeing at least one person complain that perl forums were unfriendly, but in that case it turned out it was because he took it as an insult when after he posted code others would comment with re-writes using fewer lines/characters. He didn't understand that they were just playing and not critiquing or trying to tell him that his code should be have been written that way instead. If anything, the shortest possible way to do something should probably be avoided in perl code you plan on ever having to work on again, but it can still be fun to see how compact you can make it.