In a comment discussion, I mentioned my disdain for using Perl for anything larger than simple scripts or line-based text parsing (which is what it was invented for...see below). I received some pushback on this opinion from Shelly, obviously from her own experiences with the language.  I enjoy pondering a dissenting opinion when based on experiences or data.  She says:

Using a good OO design and programming techiques, a perl program is not a nightmare for maintainability...just like any other language (yes even assembly).

Obviously, I need to open my mind here. I guess my question becomes: Once you get to the point where you need to apply OO design and programming techniques, are there not more suitable languages for a project like that?  I'm curious to know what other people's opinions are on this.  What are the advantages of Perl over other truly OO languages?  Why would you choose it instead of another language?

For your enjoyment, here's the original manpage for perl:

 NAME
  perl | Practical Extraction and Report Language

 SYNOPSIS
     perl [options] filename args

 DESCRIPTION
      Perl is a interpreted language optimized for scanning  arbi-
      trary  text  files,  extracting  information from those text
      files, and printing reports based on that information.  It's
      also  a good language for many system management tasks.  The
      language is intended to be practical  (easy  to  use,  effi-
      cient,  complete)  rather  than  beautiful  (tiny,  elegant,
      minimal).  It combines (in  the  author's  opinion,  anyway)
      some  of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people
      familiar with those languages should have little  difficulty
      with  it.  (Language historians will also note some vestiges
      of csh, Pascal, and  even  BASIC|PLUS.)   Expression  syntax
      corresponds  quite  closely  to C expression syntax.  If you
      have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk  or  sh,
      but  it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little fas-
      ter, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C,  then
      perl  may  be  for  you.  There are also translators to turn
      your sed and awk scripts  into  perl  scripts.   OK,  enough
      hype.