Readability is certainly an aspect of maintainability too, but it's also a matter of taste. Few (no?) other languages offer the large variety of phrasings that Perl does. That can make it hard for non-Perl folks to understand immediately, but it allows you to code close to natural languages on the one hand, or to compress complex algorithms to small chunks of code and explain in comments on the other hand.

I wish I could have said it that well.

-disciple