A few notes:

1. Perl will run on nearly every operating system a business will have, including some mainframe systems. Well-written Perl can be put on an NFS mount and run from a Win32 and a Unix machine without the need for recompilation.
2. Perl has the largest base of already written, freely available, well-tested code, aka CPAN.
3. Perl can talk to nearly every single RDBMS used in the business world, and does so with the same interface, aka DBI.
4. Perl lends itself to data transformation, due to the prescence of regexes, hashes, and many importer/exporter modules. Examples would include Text::CSV, Spreadsheet::ParseExcel, jmcnamara's Spreadsheet::WriteExcel, CGI, DBI, XML::Parser, Template Toolkit, and many others.

In other words, 90% of every single Perl application has already been written. Because of all the available material, the initial development time of Perl tools is less than 1/3 of the equivalent time in any other language with equivalent capabilities.

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We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

The idea is a little like C++ templates, except not quite so brain-meltingly complicated. -- TheDamian, Exegesis 6

Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.