Perl is a great language in the right hands. In a previous job the whole software system for a successful gambling company (sans the publicly available website,

Perl is a great language in the right hands. In a previous job the whole software system for a successful gambling company (sans the publicly available website, that was PHP and later Java) ran on Perl, central server and hundreds of branch servers (and clients), the branch software was able work autonomously if the connection to the central one was down. Everything was fast, stable and there was a total of 4 of us working on it (2 with PhDs). Right about when I was leaving it was decided there will be a transition to Java (won't go into the reasons for that) and the last programmer headcount I know of was more then 20.