Well, odds are good that nothing could convince them if they're truly set in their ways. All you can do is write good, readable code and look for open minded people.

My scheme for making code readable is to try and avoid the need for comments. Use perl's keywords and your own names to have the code say things in English as much as possible. Short functions, nouns for variable names, pluralized when it is an array, verbs for functions that do things, and so on. Make the code be a comment that lacks a # in front of it.

I even had somebody say to me that the code was surprisingly readable; they aren't a programmer, and didn't know perl, but could still follow what it was doing.