Same here. Perhaps what I've enjoyed the most about Perl was the humanness and art of it. Cleverness and expressiveness were at the service of elegance.

Sure you can write amazingly obscure foot-guns in Perl but that's also true of any other language. But honestly I'd rather a few lines of obscure Perl code WITH a comment block explaining why, than a dozen classes with bits and pieces of business logic spread all over the place.