I work for a contracting company that does the websites for a sizable company with lots of seperate brands. Our code, while needing to be cleaned up in many respects, is definately not Perl3-quality. If someone tells me that Perl isn't scalable, I laugh in their face. I live scalable Perl code every day.

My grandfather was in IT management for a long time, and was once the head of IT for Rayovac. He was surprised that we could manage such a large collection of brands with the handful of developers we have. I'm not.

The problem though, is that Perl is highly susceptable to Sturgeon's Law. If you're going to use Perl, you need to hire out of only the top 10% of coders, because the rest will write code that becomes a disaster in the long run. Fortunately, following Brook's musings of the Mythical Man-Month, those top 10% will be 5-10 better than the rest (while also happy with salaries that are only 1.5-2 times more).