I don't know about other folks or their preferences for languages to program in but here are some of the criteria I use in deciding what language I'm going to write "something" in.

• Compiled, assembled or interpreted?

  If I'm going to write something targeted for an embedded system I'm going to write it in C against a cross compiler or if I need really tight code I'll write in assembler. This is not to take anything away from such targets like Basic Stamps® which you use a "compliator" to convert code written in a BASIC like language into target code.

  So where does Perl fit in? See my next comment.

• Portability and maintainability

  I hate rewriting the same code over and over again. One of the first things I discovered about Perl when I first started writing in it in 1988 was as long as I could port the interpreter to a platform (and at the time I was working on AT&T 3BX machines, HPUX machines, Solaris and SunOS machines all at the same time. If I wrote a system administration script I only wanted to write it once and believe me a Bourne shell or K shell might not be portable due to differences in shell commands between flavors of Unix®.

• No dependencies (or minimal dependencies) on proprietary software

  If I write something I don't want to have to worry about violating a license if I install it somewhere else. This was one of the first things that sent me to use Perl, gcc and a host of other tools at the time. Later when Open Source became a reality I found myself using OS tools more and more in the professional world I live in.

So, in keeping with my life-long philosophy of "Right Tool for the Right Job" I find myself using Perl for the majority of the coding that I do. I do use other languages. For instance my personal website is a collection of JSP pages with an underpinning of Java® servlets and filters. There are also on my hosted site cronjobs written in Perl and BASH. Not to mention stored procedures written in SQL (Postgres actually) in the backend database.

To the bigots and zealots of any stripe: Sorry, there is no one tool that does it all. Close.. but no cigar.