With regard to those "N-thousand lines of code" statements, please bear in mind that one line in Perl is many lines in other languages. For a more quantitative point of view on this, please see any of the function-point-metric comparisons of current programming languages (e.g., this one).

One related important point is the observation that the number of errors in a program increases linearly with the size of the program (in lines of code) (see Code Complete : A Practical Handbook of Software Construction. By McConnell, Steve M. ).

This obviously means: less code to write for a given functionality means less errors. And less errors make for faster development, and better applications.

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com