This would be nice, but is often not possible when dealing with tons legacy code or thousands (or millions) of LoC. There are many reasons for this: time, risk, money - but most importantly, business logic - much of which is baked into legacy code. Besides, once you move to modulinos (my suggestion) then progress to full modules, it's then much more convenient to refactor in a more modern way as you suggest. Consider the number of man-hours put into the "working" code - it will take even more time to replace the code due to the requirement to necessarily understand the code (even if you wrote it) and replicate all the assumptions both inside of the code and by anything using the code as a black box. It's super hard. Personally, I aways recommend against rewriting or fully replacing code, especially replacing Perl with another, inferior language xD.