It contributes to the notion of perl being obscure and hard to read.

I like golf not only because it reveals dark corners of perl; it also reveals perl's tremendous ability to eliminate noise and produce dense expressions. Ultimately, golf tends to be noise, when shorter statement can not anymore be contrieved, but even those constructs - add a bit of air (white space) to them, a bit more verbosity, and many of them expand into beautiful, perfectly understandable nailing-downs of solutions to the problem at hand.

Compare

%hash = ();
{
    my @keys   = qw ( a, b, c);
    my @values = 1..3;
    for ( my $c = 0; $c <= $#keys; $c++ ) {
        $hash { $keys [$c] } = $values [ $c ];
    }
}
[download]

which is a common idiom in many languages, to

@hash { qw (a, b, c) } = 1..3;
[download]

of which the latter is the golfed code version, useable in production code, and you must admit that perl to some extent is golf - well, compared to Java anyways ;-)

Any language is "obscure and hard to read" for those that don't venture into it; and no matter whether that "obscure and hard to read" judgement is uttered as a pretext to not do so, or as a disinformed dismissive, it is just prejudice - and there being perl golf or not doesn't change that in the least.

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}