"He was anticipating the argument that succinctness leads to unreadable code"
And it's a valid argument. There's sometimes a tradeoff between terseness and readability. Of course, readability suffers if the code gets too verbose as well.. go figure.
"Perl is a language where you can choose to be so terse as to be nearly unreadable"
You can actually choose a "level" of succinctness that fits the task at hand and your personal style. This is a very cool feature of Perl that it should be praised for. I agree with GP that the OP intentionally misrepresents it.
Comments
"He was anticipating the argument that succinctness leads to unreadable code"
And it's a valid argument. There's sometimes a tradeoff between terseness and readability. Of course, readability suffers if the code gets too verbose as well.. go figure.
"Perl is a language where you can choose to be so terse as to be nearly unreadable"
You can actually choose a "level" of succinctness that fits the task at hand and your personal style. This is a very cool feature of Perl that it should be praised for. I agree with GP that the OP intentionally misrepresents it.