Elegant code & Efficient code

Elegant code & Efficient code, are they inversly proportional?

There's no excuse for allowing you to come up with shit that ranks worse than Spectrum BASIC. Problem is, you aren't the only person in the world who writes code. You need to use others' libraries (for which hopefully but not always you will not need to fix or change anything), and you need to work with others in projects. Even if you're properly disciplined and write proper code, the next guy's code will suck, and you'll have to deal with that suckage. This makes Perl a hell to maintain, a write-once language mostly.

Perl is very forgiving of mistakes - which makes it a wonderful language to learn in.
Not pointing out your mistakes when learning is not wonderful.

Perl's philosophy is that the programmer knows whats best
My philosophy is that I know what's best (though I may be wrong sometimes), and others don't always know what's best, and sometimes, what's best for me is not what's best for others, so less "23479034 ways to do things" will be helpful. Not only you may utterly dislike ways 673 and 1498, but you only know ways 1-100, while the next guy knows ways 101-200, and you can't read each other's code.

To create a language that is restrictive to a certain way of thinking, or a certain way of writing code, is creating a language that is only applicable to a reduced problem set, and to a certain way of thinking.
Almost all programming languages, and probably all, are limited to a reduced problem set, and suck outside it. This set may be larger or smaller, but it almost always, and probably always exists. It's good that a language requires certain uniformity because it becomes better for large projects and code reuse. You can't work with the next guy if you totally hate his style, or write /("%/()=#$/"#(/=()"/#%& hacks he won't understand. I consider restricting to a ceertain way of thinking good. If you don't like the style, you're out of luck, but you'll find a language that suits you. Those who do, find more uniformity. That said, I didn't find it so hard to adapt to Python, which at first had a few things I frowned upon (immutable strings, throwing OMG FUCK FUCK FUCK NO U exceptions for things I was used to do in Perl and PHP) and was not used to others because they simply did not exist in other languages I knew, but I found I could still do things the way I like and in two weeks I could read everyone's code and work something useful out of it.