And how many lines of code do you think that system would have been in another language?

I absolutely agree that Perl does not offer a lot of support for developing large software systems maintainably. But a lot of that is due to the decision to make a small amount of Perl do what would take considerably more in another language.

"Keep it small" is a valid approach to maintainability for many kinds of problems. It is one which many languages lose sight of. But it certainly isn't a magic bullet, and I wouldn't be surprised that a 170,000 line project in Perl could get painful.