Just my opinion, but the better Perl programmer you are, the simpler (simple is the opposite of obfuscated) your code is to understand :-) You should strive to create code that is simple for everyone to understand, whether or not your code is written in Perl.

It is useful to understand obfuscated code to see just what can be done with Perl, but I don't think there's really any use for obfuscated code. If it takes me 5 minutes to figure out what a piece of code does, than that is 4 minutes too long ;-) One of my programming teachers in college told us about the "KISS" principle - you may have heard of it - "K"eep "I"t "S"imple "S"tupid. That one stuck with me.

HTH.