Having used perl for a large corporate project that most suits would want done in C, the single biggest reason to use perl is that it gives you a rapid rate of development. That doesn't just mean you get it up and running, "quick and dirty". It also means that you can fix bugs faster. 40% of our project bugs were located and fixed in under 4 hours. How's that for rapid response time?

Once an engineer came to me and said, "Your program doesn't work for this special system architecture because you need to handle this special timing message." I asked her for the technical specifications for the message, creating a new object file defining the message object, and hooked in the message to system startup. This whole sequence took 20 minutes and her code worked immediately. If this had been done in C++, we would have had a minimum 1 hour just to recompile the system, not to mention how much harder the design would be (due to C++'s strict methodology).

Because of how large corporations work, it turned out that my group's project was doing the same thing as another group's project, which was using C++ (and later Java). We had 2 people on our team while they had 5. They had been working for 2 1/2 years on the project (or about 12 man years) while we had only spent 1 1/2 years. And yet their project could only do what ours did 9 months ago. I once considered just rewriting their project using our base core. I estimated it would take 4 weeks to completely recreate everything so it used their special interface, but it just wasn't worth the time. Too many people depended on our project, and they always wanted more features. At least they were easy to add.

-Ted