At Motorola, I designed a simulator for a piece of cell phone architecture in perl that was about 60,000 lines (50k of which were human written). In retrospect, I could have trimmed 10k lines if there weren't so many features to implement. But the crazy thing was that the simulator had a more stable and comprehensive feature set than the actual product!

I firmly believe that the belief that perl is only good for small applications is wrong. In reality, perl is a very flexible, powerful, easy to use language. But powerful and easy to use always means dangerous, and there are a lot of incompetant programmers out there. Perl code can and will look uglier than any other language. But it can also look more elegant than any other language.

In other words, the responsibility is on the programmer to write clean code, just as it always was. Using Java or Python may make it more difficult to write messy code, but it also makes it difficult to write elegant code. There is no substitute for a good programmer, and Perl is one of the few languages that admits that.

-Ted

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