I dont see why this would be difficult to express in a natural language. The main issue is learning to parse it in the right order. You have to look at the innermost expressions and work outward, but that should be familiar to anybody who has done high school math and understands the concept of order of operations (taught to me as BEDMAS).

So if you parse it in the right order it is, 'declare an array named directories_time_taged and initialize it with the contents of the DATA filehandle, and then remove the line ending from each element in the array'.

Personally I think such brevity of expression is quite nice. Off topic, this brings to mind modern prose versus prose from a hundred or two hundred years ago, the language is the same but the usage is totally different. Older English prose seems to me to be much more verbose than modern, and while often containing a pretty turn of phrase is to me sometimes unreadable for the excessive verbiage. This is similar to various programming languages versus Perl (or similar languages like Python or Ruby). The useful information density per character is much higher in Perl, enabling complex operations to be described in a succinct and easy to understand fashion. Instead of paging through screens full of code you can look at a few lines and know whats up. Of course sometime people go too far with it and make it unreably dense, but thats usually just for fun.