A small part of your problem (as well as most of us :), would be solved with another option of "Fear Perl" :). Coworkers fear perl because they do not know anything about it, but know that it's technology which leads to "what if it replaces me," and in many cases they are easily replaced by a few lines of code, and hate it for that reason. That rolls together suspicion, dislike (the coworker who are not replaced), hate (the ones who were replaced), lack of knowlege, and possibly brings in coworkers written in perl :).