To be perfectly honest, I don't see Perl as running my household. Though there would probably be a good number of Perl scripts and cron jobs monitoring some automated stuff.
I see it more of a cluster of Java application, tied together with a nice touchscreen GUI created in Swing. IMO, that would provide a more direct act on anything using the GUI, and leave the automated jobs running small in the background. The OO nature of Java seems to be better, in this case, for something that requires more user interation to accomplish.
