alt Hacker NewsThat's not super subtle any more than it's super subtle that "*" performs multiplication and "+" performs addition. Sometimes you just need to learn the language.
This is not a general defense of Perl, which is many times absolutely unreadable, but this example is perfectly comprehensible if you actually are trying to write Perl and not superimpose some other language on it.*
There's is no fair comparison to be made here with how + and * work is most languages, precisely because + and * work the same in most languages, while whatever perl is doing here is just idiosyncratic.
Even C gets it's fair share of flack for how it overloads * to mean three different things! (multiplication, pointer declaration, and dereference)