Congratulations, japhy! :) I've partecipated three times to regional contests and I can assure to other monks 4/7 is a great result :)

Good luck for the finals :))

Update: Fixed typo: "can't" "can". Thank you blakem

Update: A possible good variation on programming-language advocacy could be propose some ICPC problem, solve it using a subset of CPAN (modules in standard distribution of Perl could be good) and compare it to a Pascal, C or C++ version. Or, maybe, organize (during a PM BOF?) a contest inspired to ACM ICPC but where you have to use Perl.