"Be a heretic" - at least that's what the cookie in the upper left corner says ;)

Having clicked the "reply" button, I have to step forward and bite your flamebait - I don't see where Microsoft did horrible things to C and C++ - the MFC is just a library (at least in my eyes - I don't program C or C++ for that matter) - it has extensive interfaces for Windows and some container classes etc. - I would applaud Microsoft for bringing some other means of (Win32) user interface programming to Perl (although I don't see much use for it, honestly). And let's be honest, there weren't much horrible things left to do to C and C++ anyway.

If you are talking about implementations of C and C++, I don't see bad things there either - Microsoft is in the best company of Borland, Zortech and GNU C(++) for the various and differing implementations of C and C++ - and Perl is a settled "industry standard" already - maybe things would be getting interesting if Microsoft put Larry Wall on their paycheck to make some proprietary extensions to Perl, and Larry then refused to back-port these extensions ...

I think you see this issue too narrow - the Spirit of Perl cannot be corrupted by Microsoft