I think the most disturbing/humorous aspect of this story derives from the following:

Neither the CTO nor the engineering manager knew Perl.

They felt the code was so horribly-written that it needed a ground-up rewrite before they could add features.

They believed that Java was more 'scalable' than Perl.

If the first is true, how the heck did they arrive at the other two conclusions? Sounds like PHB voodoo to me. Perhaps they should've hired merlyn for a code review. :)

--Jim