I agree with the sentiment that clarity, in most scenarios, is far more important than brevity. But you surely aren't suggesting that code should be so obvious that even someone who doesn't know a given language or dialect automatically knows exactly what code in that language or dialect means?

That said, P5ers ought to be most of the way there:

• The sort is a (builtin) function call.
• The prefix + coerces to numeric.
• The * is a Whatever. (A P6 innovation, explained below.)
• The , is the comma operator. (P6 has cleaned up the P5 warts. The comma operator never returns the last value; even in item context it returns a list, as most people would expect.)
• @array is an array variable.

All of this is absolutely obvious to even a beginner P6er.

Many P5ers won't know what a Whatever is, and won't know the way the sort builtin interprets closure arguments, so I'll explain those:

• The Whatever is as pervasive and basic in P6 as the $_ ("it") variable is in both Perls. In many scenarios, such as this one, a single Whatever means { $_ }. Add in the prefix plus and you have sort { +$_ }, @array.
• The sort builtin interprets a single arg closure as its first arg as a "key extractor", which is the clean P6 abstraction of what the map at the start of a P5 ST is comparatively crudely abstracting.

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