"a whole bunch of people who'd started writing Perl in 1994 for CGI scripts had cause to revisit their own work a year or 5 years later to maintain it or to add features and found it utterly incomprehensible."
You can write garbage in any language. If these people found their own code incomprehensible, it's their own fault.
"But for 50,000 line applications worked on over 10 years by dozens of different people, it was never a good choice."
I've yet to be convinced that Ruby or Python are any better. In many ways they're even worse.
Yes, you can write anything in any language that's Turing complete, but that's not the point. Perl's mantra is "there's more than one way to do it", and so you get code that does it a million different ways. Python emphasizes there being only one right way, and so Python code is inherently more maintainable.
Does every Python programmer use the same sorting mechanism? Object decomposition technique? File layout? Naming conventions? Web framework? Database? Testing strategy? Documentation format? Installation mechanism? Editor?
Semi-enforced consistency of indentation would have contributed very little to the maintainability of any project to which I've contributed. I care more about finding and understanding and modifying code than whether I need to run it through a tidier.
You can write garbage in any language. If these people found their own code incomprehensible, it's their own fault.
"But for 50,000 line applications worked on over 10 years by dozens of different people, it was never a good choice."
I've yet to be convinced that Ruby or Python are any better. In many ways they're even worse.