Exactly. One case at work involved a complex installation that had a master installer that would run other parts. It would have been great to write that in Perl. But, how does one run a Perl program off a CD without "installing" it or the whole Perl system first? Even using a bundling system like PerlApp had a certain amount of risk involved. Instead, we wrote that piece in InstallShield, which easily makes a self-contained single runable file that can be simply run from the CD or other location, and is known to do that well. However, it turned into a terrible mess because the language isn't at all robust or suitable for larger programs. I wanted to use Perl because of Perl the language. I could not deliver a Perl solution because of Perl the system.

—John