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...