https://github.com/roswell/roswell
(As a side-note: Perl 5 was really the ideal language for this, by design; we might be in a different world today if it hadn't been derailed by Perl Forever^W 6).
Anyway, I usually avoid perl. While definitely a true programming language, I really don't like it. I find that it lacks clarity, and quickly collapses into bash-like hackery.
I personally use Python when it's a notch above shell, but not enough to pull out the big guns.
(I use to write a lot of perl when I was a kid, even made an accounting system in it, so my dislike of perl is from experience. We also had a 6000 line perl build script at my current job which was the last drop. Rewrote it to 40 lines of batch and 150 lines of Python. Likewise, I also wrote a lot of PHP, and can no longer consider it a proper programming language.)
Are you claiming that its size was because Perl forced it to be long winded?
I feel like some programming languages, no matter the structure of the application, feels unstructured and write-only in nature. To me, Perl is one of such languages. Python has a similar effect, but I feel like it is more controllable as long as the project is kept within a sensible length.
So while that abomination was primarily the fault of the designer, I do think that Perl invites this behavior one way or another.
(I gave up entirely on reading that disaster of a build script, and instead instrumented system() so that I could trace the calls to various tools and infer the logic myself.)
Well, the question is: what do you use as a replacement? For my scripts I tend to pull in some version of PHP as soon as needed. Perl is something that's universally available in anything based on Debian or Ubuntu, but it's a maintenance nightmare, and PHP doesn't care whether I use spaces, tabs or a mixture, or if there are due to any circumstances mixed line endings in a file whereas Python may or may not barf on encountering any of said things...