My impression was experienced Perl programmers took pride in making the smallest code possible, all in one line.

At my company they really locked in the project being dead if the original contributors left.

Perl propped up regex (JavaScript regex is based off of it), so I get the impression Perl practitioners tried to make all the code regex-y as possible as a cultural thing.

There was a regular feature in the perl community for 'golf' or 'crazy one liners' but almost no one used that shit in any actual code that left their user directory.