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.
I remember the Perl art competitions, where you would write Perl code that would run and actually do something, and would be ASCII art at the same time. Obviously, lots of camels ;-)
Code golf is fun as a challenge, but it's obviously hell to find in a script someone else wrote that you're supposed to maintain.
> Perl programmers took pride in making the smallest code possible, all in one line
And this became a joke and meme.
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.