Actually ... you can say "this code is beautiful". You just (usually) cannot say it objectively. ;-) And, there is a lot of consensus on a lot of issues. Most of perlstyle is likely agreed to by most perl developers who have enough experience to tell the difference between readable ... and unmaintainable. By experience, I simply mean having to maintain code that is more than 6-12 months old, even if it is their own code.