Sean, Dave Turner has sent a very useful link that might give some indirect guidance out of your dilemma:
----- Original Message ----- From: "Dave Turner" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2002 3:04 PM Subject: Re: [Boston.pm] maintenance of large perl code bases http://wwwipd.ira.uka.de/~prechelt/Biblio/jccpprtTR.ps.gz Authors' Abstract: 80 implementations of the same set of requirements are compared for several properties, such as run time, memory consumption, source text length, comment density, program structure, reliability, and the amount of effort required for writing them. The results indicate that, for the given programming problem, which regards string manipulation and search in a dictionary, "scripting languages" (Perl, Python, Rexx, Tcl) are more productive than "conventional languages" (C, C++, Java). In terms of run time and memory consumption, they often turn out better than Java and not much worse than C or C++. In general, the differences between languages tend to be smaller than the typical differences due to different programmers within the same language. ************ This study says to me, again, that programmer training, not language choice is likely to be your culprit, and the place to concentrate your efforts to get more maintainable code. Certainly not a new insight or comment in this thread, but given some quantitative backing by this study that you might be able to use. Too bad maintainability was not also included--there are other papers and links on the site regarding maintainability that might be useful to you.
