in reply to use Perl;

My company set up and sell Linux servers. We use perl for practically everything : management interfaces, backup programs, automatic system upgrade, report generation, customer management, bug tracking and support requests...

We're also developing some data management applications, all Perl. For instance I just shipped a data management software for INA ( french national media archive), that will manage a pool of 40 servers and monitor and index 160TB of storage in an Oracle database. I wrote it in a couple of months (total ~5000 lines of new code) and it just entered the test phase last week.

I'm pretty sure it was close to impossible to achieve such a work with most other languages on the time frame and budget. Especially with Java, C, C++ and friends...