for context, author of blog post has written two published Perl books. To make matters worse, they are called "Perl One Liners", "Perl One Liners Explained".

To clarify: "Perl One-Liners Explained" is self-published, and "Perl One-Liners" is based on it and published by No Starch Press. Not sure why that makes "matters worse"?

He also self-published "Awk One-Liners Explained" and "Sed One-Liners Explained" and has a "Bash One-Liners Explained" in the pipeline, see http://www.catonmat.net/books

I have a similar knee-jerk reaction to one-liners from a maintainability standpoint. I have this mental vision of Perl or Shell that looks like Brainfuck.