Let's talk about the real world. You work for a moderately-sized major retailer with about 700 stores around the country, hundreds of thousands of transactions per day every day, and you do all the back-end processing in Perl. There are about 4,730 Perl programs and associated libraries that figure into some part of that operation. They're working on a cluster of 64 blade-server computers located at 7 data-centers around the country, around the clock, not to mention the back-end processing controllers located in every store. And then there are the distribution-centers, the warehouses... 24/7/365, the processing never ceases.

All in Perl... all on Linux.

Now, what were you saying about “C++'s or Java's huge head-start?” How, exactly, do you propose that this company is going to accomplish this “change” that you speak of, let alone pay for it? Do we shut-down 700 stores for the interim, and stop making money and all that?