And then there are the handful “war-horse” languages such as Perl (and, in its own world, COBOL) that can be relied upon to ride into battle with you and to bring you out both victorious and alive.

Actually, shouldn't that be "to ride into battle for you"? Thats how Perl works, isn't it? You have to show it how a access the battle plan and the battle field, set the option if you want to win or loose and have that whole thing automated in no time. And you'd probably find most of the stuff you need already on CPAN, so you would only have to write some basic glue logic anyway...