Maybe it was just me who failed to grasp your main point :)

At any rate, I think my point is still valid. The distinction to me is that instead of saying "you're out of date, Perl *isn't* a scripting language", I think the actual message should be "you're out of date, Perl's not just a scripting language, it's so much more!" (wow, that *really* does sound like marketing :)

The rest of my tirade was just my thoughts on how we got into this perceptual mess in the first place.