Yeah perl really fails when it comes to maintainability. If you ever write any perl and the requirements change over time (they almost certainly will in a professional setting), you have to pretty much be willing and able to throw it away and start over or accept your fate of wasting unnecessary hours. I'd never advocate for building systems in perl, because nobody wants to come back and modify some buggy piece of code when it's so unreasonably unreadable. If you want to write some perl for your home automation system, be my guest. Please don't use it in a situation where I grab a bug fix ticket, open the code, and find a pile of dollar signs and ampersands staring back at me.