I'm CTO of a startup web firm and I run my own programming business as well. In my experience, I'm usually talking to customers that have almost zero knowledge of how their computer, the internet, or electronics in general operate. They have a love-hate relationship with MS Power Point and Word and have a general set of requirements for a program.

For new clients (and projects within my firm) I usually don't even mention Perl at all. I list the buzzwords that Perl represent and almost always 'make a sale' (if they can afford me). I talk about the benefits I bring to the table with the language I program in and address their concerns as they come up. Here are some examples of how I describe Perl:

• Perl is Open Source. Open Source means that the actual working bits of the language are available to all anyone who is interested. Open Source means that there is no company that I am relying on to stay in business or have reasonable licensing structures.
• Perl is Long Lived. Perl has been growing and improving since it's introduction in 80's. The greatest part of this longevity comes from the fact that it is constantly being improved.
• Perl is Portable. You will be able to run these applications on pretty much any computer on the planet.
• Perl is Sticky. I may create your application to run on MySQL/Postgres, but it can be very easily modified to run on Oracle or DB2. Perl easily interacts with a wide variety of databases, protocols, and other programming languages.

But, to be honest, most of these issues never come up. My customers are usually most concerned with a) How much will it cost? b) How fast can you do it? And Perl has the very best answer to both of those questions. CPAN, and the ease of pounding out Perl code in general, mean that Perl almost always wins where it counts the most.

None of this addresses the problem of some large corporations not recognizing the value of Perl or Perl programmers. But I'm not in that situation :)

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