You have just hit on one thing I love about Perl. Perl is
a true master at the, "keep it short and sweet" school of
maintainability. People who think about keeping million
line projects under control tend to lose sight of the fact
that that is even possible!
One thing that novices forget. Optimizing for the ease of
debugging in the end is a very good way to optimize for the
speed of programming as well. People say, "I didn't have
time to think about that" and then wonder why they seem to
spend all of their time tracking down bugs...