I appreciate this measured response, but want to make very explicit that I did not mean to criticise you or your advice, much less deny its value to the novice programmer; I certainly apologise if I did so unintentionally.<p>I always enjoy your writings on Perl, even if I sometimes disagree with specific opinion-based recommendations (as is, almost by definition, the prerogative of Perl programmers), and I hope that I didn&#x27;t seem to be knocking you or them.  I was not even disagreeing with this particular advice, just saying that it didn&#x27;t necessarily establish the attitude of the broader Perl community on punning in variable names.  (There always will be code golfers who will value cleverness over maintainability—and there should be; without them we would never have such gems as `[$a =&gt; $b]-&gt;[$b &lt;= $a]` for `min($a, $b)`.)