My question, is can perl support a huge corporation? Does anyone think that perl reaches a threshold where it can no longer be looked at as meta-level of objects, services, and "beans"? Has anyone sucessfully walked accross the line of midsize (tens of thousands of lines of code) application into the domain of huge business to business corporation while keeping perl's flexibility intact?

Certainly. Etoys.com is all Perl. Deja is all Perl. Amazon.com uses Perl for nearly all their backend operations. Yahoo is mostly Perl behind the scenes. Altavista is all Perl, except for the purchased software. Sportsline.CBS.com is "80% Perl".

These are not toy corporations. These are seriously big operations, using Perl for daily mission-critical operations, with code bases numbering in the hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

There are 1.5 million Perl programmers, with 200 new programmers a day. You are in good company.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker