Personally I find that given a little effort, you can balance Perl's brevity with readability. Certainly you need a proficient Perl programmer to be able to read the resulting code easily, but such a programmer can pick up the happenings very quickly. Java and many other languages on the other hand are invariantly verbose, which annoys me greatly.
I realize there's things other languages are better suited for than Perl, but I'd gravitate to Perl just for its brevity, or to be precise, its potential brevity, even in those cases. When it takes only one or two lines to filter certain elements out of a complex data structure as opposed to 15, and when the entirety of a data munging algorithm fits on a single screen, I can simply concentrate on what the code is actually doing much better. But then, I'm a rather right-brained, whollistic thinker and work better when I can keep the entire big picture in my head at once, whereas more linear thinkers will likely be annoyed by the density of Perl. To each his own.
Makeshifts last the longest.
