I totally agree with mahmud about uniformity of syntax and the fragility of doing things like this.

However the original post/gist was just a bit of fun! So here is the same bit of fun in Perl: http://gist.github.com/256992

  use Modern::Perl;
  use Url;
  use JSON qw(decode_json);

  # output the json as is
  say http://twitter.com/statuses/show/6592721580.json;
 
  # => He nose the truth.
  say decode_json( http://twitter.com/statuses/show/6592721580.json )->{text};

First time I've played with Devel::Declare module (http://search.cpan.org/dist/Devel-Declare/) and I found it to be straightforward & an extremely powerful beast for mangling with the perl5 parser in a robust and safe way.