I don't understand this. There are about 5 to 10 entry level to intermediate level Perl idioms that are just plain useful. (file handles, sed and grep commands, basic regular expressions, etc.) that can do most of what you need to do with typical quick and dirty Perl programs. It doesn't take much to remain fluent with these, though you may need a cheat sheet for keeping @ $ and & straight. (warnings and strict prevent the worst headaches, though.)

My first perl scripts are a complete mess. But my more recent ones are generally one-screen in size more or less... and are a few short (often lispy) subroutines followed by a short imperative program that does something to text stream based on the arguments that were passed in with it.

Decent perl code looks (to me) something half way between Ruby and BASIC. Maybe I'll find out before long, but I just don't see how people can suddenly stop being able to understand their Perl code-- unless they are completely sloppy and cutting all kinds of corners.... :evil: