Anonymous Monk++. (and by the way I don't normally upvote anonymous nodes because it's kind of a waste of a vote). Banking your career on a single general-purpose programming language is downright foolish (I qualify it with "general-purpose" because there are people who make very productive and satisfactory careers as SAS programmers, but that's different). That said, the reality is that you will often find a job description that really attracts you but requires a language you don't really know. So I would suggest that you bone up on the language really quickly, send in a resume that emphasizes your broader skillset and experience, and if you're lucky enough to get an interview then go in there and prove to them that you're a good enough programmer to fit right in even if you don't have much experience with that particular language. Write up a simple program on the whiteboard or something. Granted, all this is easier said than done, but I
definitely don't think it's worth fretting over "Perl is bad for my career" or some other such rubbish.