I'm not sure where you jumped from "expressing the intent of code in English" to "there's probably some Perl idioms that are as esoteric to translate as Japanese honorifics." There's a lot of functionally useful translation that can be used, and I don't know if the meditation you mentioned was concerned that such a translation had to be round-trip (in allowing the English version to be a unique equivalent for a given bit of Perl).

As an aside, y'all is singular, all y'all is plural. ;)