A couple of years back I participated in writing the best practices/coding style for our (fairly large and often Perl-using) company. It was done by a committee of "senior" Perl developers.

As anything done by consensus, it had parts which everyone disagreed with. Duh.

The part that rubbed wrong the most was a strong recommendation to NOT use many Perlisms (loosely defined as code idioms not present in, say C++ or Java), such as "Avoid using '... unless X;' constructs".

The main rationale posited for such rules as this one was that non-Perl developers would have much harder time with the Perl code base otherwise. The assumption here I guess is that Perl code jockeys are rarer breed overall - and among new hires to the company - than non-Perlers.

I was wondering whether SO has any good arguments to support or reject this logic... it is mostly academic curiosity at this point as the company's Perl coding standard is ossified and will never be revised again as far as I'm aware.

P.S. Just to be clear, the question is in the context I noted - the answer for an all-Perl smaller development shop is obviously a resounding "use Perl to its maximum capability".