Turn the question back around and ask them the same thing.

And here are some advantages Perl has over ASP and Java (to throw at them while they're still trying to come up with some good reasons for their preferred languages):

• Built-in text processing facilities - regexen, split, etc.
• CPAN - there's probably a module on CPAN that will do what you need, and will do it a lot more reliably since most CPAN modules are subjected to more testing than a handrolled module.
• Communities like PerlMonks
• And most importantly, a saner syntax. For example, let's open a file in Perl and write to it:

  open my $fh, ">FILENAME" or die "Can't write FILENAME: $!";
  print $fh "We are writing a line of text to a file.\nSecond line";
  close $fh;
  [download]

  In ASP:

  <%
  Dim objFSO, objTextStream, file
  
  file = Server.MapPath("samplefile.txt")
  
  Set objFSO = Server.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
  Set objTextStream = objFSO.OpenTextFile(file , 2, True)
  
  objTextStream.WriteLine "We are writing a line of text to our text fil
  +e" & 
      VBCfLf & "This is our second line of text" & VBCrLf
  
  objTextStream.Close
  
  Set objTextStream = Nothing
  Set objFSO = Nothing
  %>
  [download]

  Or Java:

  try {
          BufferedWriter out = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("outfil
  +ename"));
          out.write("We are writing a line of text to our text file\nThi
  +s is our second line of text");
          out.close();
      } catch (IOException e) {
      }
  [download]

  I know which one I'd rather write. The Java example isn't as ludicrously verbose as the ASP sample, but I still find Perl's syntax much more straightforward.
• Perl's interpreter is extremely fast. If you run Perl with mod_perl or ISAPI, you'll get excellent performance. I would suspect this is faster than ASP and strongly suspect that this is faster than Java, but I have no numbers to prove this.

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