I don't think my statement is overblown... In fact I enjoy writing Perl and working with Perl, so I think its rather sad that it is so difficult to get people to accept the idea of a single compiled executable. In a sense, if this is the biggest problem, then that's a Good Thing. On the other hand, it is a problem and Gurus like merlyn (who has my respect as an excellent Perl coder) need to be more open minded about it.