The meditation Perl in the Microsoft Research Center seems to have made me more sensitive to noticing mentions of "Microsoft" and "Perl" in close proximity.

My latest delightful discovery is that the C# compiler Test team uses a perl script to execute and validate their test suite (more than 18,000 distinct tests) several times every day. This is particularly apposite for me as our test processes are very much in the spotlight right now where I work. If only we could ditch the GUI </wry smirk>

No surprise, just a pleasant resonance.

Here is a quote from the web log of Gus Perez, the C# Compiler Test Team Lead:

Our test harness (tool we use to execute and validate results of each test) is a Perl script developed several years ago, before C#, in the C++ team (which is where the C# team was born before we had our own product unit) that has proven to a lot of us that simple is often better when it comes to test harnesses. Every now and then we get the urge to start working on a new, all-powerful harness (of course written in C#), but somehow we always end up holding off on that adventure as what we have has demonstrated it's capable time and again and there's always other work that needs to get done.

Source: http://www.jixal.com/blog/archives/000085.html