I absolutely agree with you that Perl's ability to support rapid development is one of Perl's biggest winning point. It does improve every Perl programmers "development experience".

Said this, I am not saying Perl is the only way of rapid development and to improve one's programming experience. I know not everyone like Microsoft, but you have to acknowledge that Microsoft does/did spend a huge effort in this area, and they did it very well. It is not very wrong, if I say Microsoft is actually one of the pioneers.

Java is also a well recognized try in this area, and it is a big success.

Acknowledge those other successful languages does not hurt Perl, absolutely not. Each language has its own use, its own strength, its own weak point...

Perl is not fast, and uses lots of memory, those are agreed by most IT guys, but it still has its own seat in the hall of fame.

To say there is applications not require speed is a little bit misleading. You have to quantify the speed requirement of an application. For example, we want to create a piece of code to do so and so, and the requirement says that it is fine for it to finish within n minutes, after our analysis, we decided Perl can meet this requirement, and we want to take advantage of Perl's rapid dev ability. so we pick Perl.

Next day we have another application, it is only allowed to take m minutes. After a brief study, we decided that, Perl can not meet the requirement, and base on what the application will do, we find both java and c++ might be a good fit, then we go Java or c++. (Said this, I am not judging whether Java is faster, or Perl is faster. My feeling is that it would depends on the nature of the application, but in this example, I assume java is faster in what we want to do.)

We don't need it to be "that fast", becasue it is not required, does not mean we don't want it to be that fast. If you can make it faster, you obviously would make it faster. However we have other requirements need to be taken care of, for example, as you said, we don't want to debug a memory leak at 2am.