I believe like with any language PERL has it's ups and it's downs. And what you need to do is get a base of languages and use what is best suited. Something that needs to be quick and small and run on a single style machine (x86, sparc, etc) I would write it in Assembly. If it needed to be small and fast but be multi-platform C would be the answer. If it needs to handle complex data and be very powerful I would go with C++. And Perl would be for pretty much any thing where you either need it done really fast and easy to modify.

But it is always fun to do the stuff in PERL though. Because of all the cool features and simple data structures.

--Joe