I blinked at the use of 'legacy' and 'perl' in the same phrase, as I'm used to thinking of perl as a relatively new language, but a quick mental inventory of our network made me realize that we in fact run legacy code as well -- but only because it is still doing what it was originally designed to do, not because it's unmaintainable. The bits that have needed to change over the years, have.

A question that came to mind while reading this post: does anyone have a grasp on how many active perl programmers are out there, versus the number of active java programmers? (I mean folks who code on a regular basis and have progressed farther than 'Learn to program X in 21 days' level.) A factor in deciding which language management should put their energies behind would be the size of the pool of programmers available for the task, from the standpoint of both cost (higher supply generally lowers the price) and community resources.