As your program grows in size, the lack of strong typing basically kills your ability to handle a very large program and so you don’t find the million-line Perl program.

In response, chromatic said:

the reason that there aren’t many million-line Perl programs is that the people who are capable of writing and managing million-line Perl programs have better ways to organize their projects than glomming a million lines of Java into a single shared-everything instance.

My reflection and thoughts:

1. Interestingly, why the pick on Perl? not Python or Ruby or Lisp-flavoured ones?
2. s/Perl/PHP/g or s/Perl/Python/g etc. on chromatic’s quote still valid and sound;
3. Java => Strong typing? Not necessarily always;
4. IntelliJ IDEA is the only reason I still code in Java, Eclipse? that would be another post;
5. Vim (together with some bash scripts and esvn) has been my primary “IDE” for projects that involve php, python, bash and javascript;
6. I have written Perl applications before, and would be very happy to pick it up for my next project if everything else fits (e.g. the team factor);
7. When would I code in Java? most likely a project that:
   • being “enterprisy”, or
   • I am really interested to learn, explore and apply, e.g. Antlr.