My take on large projects in Perl is that they can be done well and elegantly, but often aren't. I think part of the problem is just how fast you can develop in Perl, a lot of things start out small and grow big. People don't always take the time to fix the old code up to prepare it to move to the big time, and you end up with something more organic than structured. Perl can make great large systems with proper attention spent. :) Java being more rigid forces that mindset more, but takes forever to work with compared to Perl (and has the ugliest errors in the world)