I'm making this a comment mostly because it touches on several previous posts and I'm not sure which it "belongs" with.

First off, whoever is making the point that it's insane for Perl to be used in military control systems (especially the example of submarine navigation) is absolutely right. No software is error-free, no matter what language it is written in or what platform it is running on, and indeed every commercial operating system expressly disclaims in its licensing agreement that it is not suitable for use in direct life-support systems, weapons systems, or any other application where an error could result in loss of life or catastrophic damage to property and equipment.

A professor of one of my computer science classes once gave us a real-world example of a control system he was asked to build, which was to run a chemical process which produced as byproducts metallic sodium and water, and in which pressures in a given vessel had to be controlled with great precision lest the sodium drop into the water and obliterate the plant. He declined the project, believing it to be too dangerous to ever implement, and opined that there are some processes that cannot be automated with computers and software.

But that's not what is meant by "enterprise-class" software (unless you're talking about a ship named the Enterprise. ;-) It's a horribly overloaded term, but what they are talking about, surely, is software that must operate continuously to meet a business need, and a failure of which would cost some $BIGNUM of money, but would not be implicated in loss of life, gross injury to persons, or destruction of plant and equipment.