Most of the expertise in producing something reliable and scalable sits in the developers head rather than in the language.

Truer words were never spoken, adrianh. That's the crux of the matter. Yes, Perl can be done right and can scale, too. However, it takes a gifted programmer who understands the nature of the environment and the application. Perl can also be done wrong, and that's where I worry. While there's more that has to be learned to do a J2EE scalable app, you can't do it at all until you succeed in putting all the pieces together. It's a PITA, but it does lead to working large applications. I think one gifted programmer would prefer Perl as his vehicle, but if dragonchild's right that those comprise only 1% of our population, lots of companies need an alternate route that isn't so knowledge-critical and is more noob-tolerant.