I would be inclined to take anything written by someone at Amazon about Perl with a grain or two of salt. (Whew! I think I used up a month's worth of prepositions in that last sentence!) Widely simplifying from my limited experience at that interesting company, there seems to be a mythos there that for 'real' programming, you need C++, and that Perl is only good for 'hacks'. Steve and I didn't cross paths much while I worked there, and he's entitled to his opinion, but it doesn't count for much with me, since I have found Perl to be the most productive tool (for me) to get real work done.