We have an intern (who is also a monk, though his login I know not) working on a very business critical network program as we speak. The re-write is replacing a very dark and murky brew of Informix 4gl and 'c'. We expect to get a large performance increase out of this app. We also expect it to be much more maintainable since the entire department is working with perl. It may not be as popular as Java, but network skills are still in some demand.

Good Learning! Dave