I never buy the "many keystrokes" argument, for Perl or Java or AppleScript or anything. Editors for programming have been around for a LONG time. Learn to use them effectively, as they will compensate for any lack of typing skills or energy. Autocompletion tools are not a new science. Notepad is not a programming editor.

I will argue the companion point, but this again is not just Perl: way too much syntax in most of the code I see. Too much ->{} and ${@{$$x}} and \($!) in high-level code. People get in the habit of typing while they're thinking in terms of the implementation, instead of thinking in terms of expressing the solution to a problem.

I try to write my libraries such that the caller doesn't have to write a lot of syntactic noise just to get things done. In other words, the lower level code should take it on themselves to make literate programming possible at the higher levels.