Actually, there may be some logic in what your sysad says. Terminal Services servers are often utilised by many users running many shared business applications. It can be quite a juggling act to get them all to coexist. It is a fine balancing act between many happy user with good response times and many unhappy users as one app dominates.

It is much too easy to write a perl script that will either consume as much cpu as possible, or as much memory as possible, or both. Running perl on a "production box", other than for running pre-tested, approved scripts should probably be considered a no-no most places.

If you were requesting that perl be placed there for general development/scripting purposes, then what he says makes sense. Development tools don't belong on production servers.