I program in Perl every day on my job, and we could not get along without it. Why? Because Perl, unlike Java or C++ exists by default in almost the same form on every Unix machine. So we can write applications in our development environment and know that those same applications will run on the client's production environment, which we do not control.

Perl exists by default and will run on old 90's-era operating systems like NCR's MP-RAS. All we have to do is make sure that we use the same version of Perl as the production machines (5.005)

Now what would we have to do if we wanted to write Java applications instead? We would need to convince the client to install Java on their servers, because Java is not on every UNIX machine by default.

C++ would be even worse. Our applications might not even compile on the production machines.

I don't want to oversell Perl. Larry Wall himself has said that Perl might not be around forever. But given the variety of UNIX machines out there and the fact that only Perl is on every single one, I think that Perl is very useful in 2001 and the near future.

That and the fact that a lot of CPAN modules are already written for us. One time I had to do some work using RCS, and the Perl module RCS.pm was the only tool I could find that would script RCS.