Forget all the stuff about "strictly typed languages" etc. We are dealing with "information". The information can come in many different forms, and mean different things depending on it's form. In other languages you are stuck on the "form of the information", but in Perl you just take the information and do what you want with it. Want to treat it as text? fine, as a number? fine, as a bit stream fine. Now Perl lets you do all this without having to worry about memory management, buffer overflows, and all the other drawbacks and pitfalls of "the other languages.

Java?....yuck, I see all those class files needed just to run a little app, and I delete it.

Perl just intregrates well with the way humans see information, it's the future, regardless of what the big companies say. As systems become faster, and RAM size increases, more and more people will use Perl instead of C, because it does the same thing and is easier.

For speed, use assembly, like in all the new video animation techniques. So I think using Perl as a pre- and post-processor for feeding data to assembly subroutines is the "ultimate".

From my observations of programmers I've been acquainted with, the ones that don't like Perl are the denser ones. They don't have the brainpower or willpower to pick it up, so they say "it's junk", and move on to languages like PhP.