Fun to read: Does Your Programming Language Have Magic Powers? The post is a response to The Problems of Perl: The Future of Bugzilla and dissects with ease the fallacy in the statement that maintaining projects written in Perl is harder than in any other language (in this case Ruby, PHP or Python): there is no such mechanism that can by itself enforce good coding principles. Educating people improves the maintainability of a project, nothing else! On the other hand, I see the problems faced by Bugzilla. Their base of contributors adept in Perl is clearly dwindling and thus maintenance is harder. But this does not have to be a bad thing for a full grown project. Since it’s more or less feature complete and serves the needs reliable, why bother and introduce new bugs in working code? Instead of a rewrite from scratch, it would be easier to refactor the code, write an extensive test-suite and eventually integrate a web framework (perhaps Catalyst?). After all, are 80,000 lines of code really necessary to achieve all of Bugzilla’s features?