I work with a small team (in a large company) to maintain a widely used and system critical test automation framework developed in-house. This framework was developed when perl 5.6 was considering cutting-edge, and the archaic techniques of the C programmers who designed the system are readily apparently. As an ardent supporter of Modern Perl this frustrates me on a daily basis.

This framework, and the tests written to use it, encompass nearly 2.5 million lines of code. Because of the horrendous design of the framework, I would imagine that at least a million lines of that (and pro…