Funnily enough, it's just about at the point where perl collapses under its own weight that OO techniques become useful. This is also the point where a bit more design thought before you code starts to pay off.

Curiously enough I find languages like Ruby and Perl more effective at producing larger applications than Java. Seems I'm not alone in this.

Not that this is an argument against learning Java. Learning more languages is always a good thing.