Well Perl is a real language, so of course it makes it more difficult to say “screw it, I'm redoing this in a real language”. That said the Perl that you write

Well Perl is a real language, so of course it makes it more difficult to say “screw it, I'm redoing this in a real language”. That said the Perl that you write in a one-liner should be different than the Perl that you write when the complexity rises. If you have more than a few hundred lines, you probably need to move some of it out into a module. There should also be tests for that module. It might even make sense to structure it like a CPAN module so that you can use the existing tools to test and install it.