I used to work mostly in Perl. It's true that it can easily be turned into an obfuscated mess.
But I've also written some of the most maintainable code I've ever seen in my career in Perl. One project in particular was over 30k lines long (which in non-Perl languages must be worth millions of lines of code ;).
It was put aside for a few years (4 or 5 IIR), then I had to return to it to do some maintenance and inside of an hour was able to digest the code-base, make the needed changes, test and release.
Sloppy code and poor design infects every language. Perl does make it easy, but that's because Perl has a design emphasis on one-off scripts in the same way Java has an emphasis on large-team collaboration, and write-once run-once is what makes Perl so absurdly productive.
Just like with any language, you set some code standards and some overall design principles and you can write really maintainable code in Perl.
My wife has a similar story, after learning some basic Perl, she waded into a 100k line Perl codebase and in a couple days refactored some memory intensive code to use cheaper data-structures in a memory intensive part of the code. It was no-big-deal, but that's because the original team had left things well documented and wrote along sane standards.
But I've also written some of the most maintainable code I've ever seen in my career in Perl. One project in particular was over 30k lines long (which in non-Perl languages must be worth millions of lines of code ;).
It was put aside for a few years (4 or 5 IIR), then I had to return to it to do some maintenance and inside of an hour was able to digest the code-base, make the needed changes, test and release.
Sloppy code and poor design infects every language. Perl does make it easy, but that's because Perl has a design emphasis on one-off scripts in the same way Java has an emphasis on large-team collaboration, and write-once run-once is what makes Perl so absurdly productive.
Just like with any language, you set some code standards and some overall design principles and you can write really maintainable code in Perl.
My wife has a similar story, after learning some basic Perl, she waded into a 100k line Perl codebase and in a couple days refactored some memory intensive code to use cheaper data-structures in a memory intensive part of the code. It was no-big-deal, but that's because the original team had left things well documented and wrote along sane standards.