OK, I see where you are going with this.

I guess part of my problem is that I've been discussing this inside the wrong frame. And like you said, conflating OO, code generation, and so on isn't going to help.

I'd be fine with writing procedural code using functional techniques, 1st class functions, closures, etc.

That may end up off limits. :(

FWIW, there was a Java guy on our team who honestly thought that the map function resulted in unmaintainable code. In any case, Point Guy thinks that once Perl finishes building a parse tree, it's done compiling. That hasn't been my understanding for years and years.