Defaults

They make code easier to read:

while (<>) { next if /comment/; s/foo/bar/; print; }

They can make code harder to read, but (duh) you shouldn't use them in those situations.
A baseline for when it's bad: you use a foreach loop to give $_ a value but in the loop you don't use any operator that has $_ as its default argument. If you're going to say $_ everywhere, you might as well use a meaningful variable name.
Counter-argument: is it useful to have long loop variable names?
We have implicit antecedents in English: "take the pizza: unwrap, bake, slice, and eat."

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YAPC 2000: Stages of a Perl Programmer - 12