Nah, barely. The line of code just shows what Perl is good at: using minimalist building blocks, combining into something actually meaningful.

In itself, the ternary operator ?: is not so surprising. It makes its appearance in many languages, such as C, C++, C# (I believe), Obj-C (I believe), Java (I believe), JavaScript, and likely many more.

Statement modifiers also aren't very mention-worthy, in that many languages in the C-family allow you to

if (THIS)
    THAT;
[download]

Whereas Perl requires the curly braces around it:

if (THIS) {
    THAT;
}
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But not if you write it as

THAT if THIS;
[download]

So statement modifiers are just one of those things in Perl's syntax that make Perl Perl, however it's not something we don't know in one form or another from other languages.

Yeah, I remember the ternary iffrom C; didn't use it very much. I'd rather write code that a new developer can read slightly more englishly, and the braces, newlines, and indentation give a fair bit of intuition to where the code is going.

I know I carry a lot of that prejudice into my Perl, but I rarely get complaints about my Perl being unreadable (only my variable names, which I staunchly continue to lay out in my peculiar 3x2 format -- but the code itself almost never gets complaints).