I remain firmly of the opinion that if you're not using Perl's flexibility and freedom to write clearer, more maintainable code then you're Doing It Wrong.

Generally - algorithm is most important and worth getting right, as that's got some big boons in efficiency. But it's very rarely worth trading off readability and maintainability for a few cpu cycles.

As Brian Kernighan put it: "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"