[kedean]

It's two extremes of the same problem. Perl code generally doesn't abstract enough, while Java code often abstracts too much. I recently was tasked with porting a legacy perl system to Java. The main pl file of the legacy code was only about ~6k lines, but it also only contained 6 subroutines in the entire thing. The final Java product probably had more actual code glueing everything together and abstracting it, but the meaty parts were much cleaner, simpler, and easier to understand. I was able to show newcomers the new system and within a few minutes they could figure out at least what the major moving parts do, while they would immediately run away form the perl code due to the sheer scariness of it.