That's a good point. The solid base of maintenance is the overall design imposed on the code - the way how bits and pieces work together. Perl doesn't imply nor exclude any specific methodologies - so this core aspect of maintainability is decoupled from the language itself.

Readability is certainly an aspect of maintainability too, but it's also a matter of taste. Few (no?) other languages offer the large variety of phrasings that Perl does. That can make it hard for non-Perl folks to understand immediately, but it allows you to code close to natural languages on the one hand, or to compress complex algorithms to small chunks of code and explain in comments on the other hand.

That's why I would say that Perl is designed to meet exactly that level of maintainability that you want.

^~Django
"Why don't we ever challenge the spherical earth theory?"

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