This is a very touchy subject. It has taken me years to learn how to dance around customers' internal issues. I wish I had known a lot of this 15 years ago. In fact, it would be great if university IT programs offered a class in real-world issues such as:

• consultant diplomacy
• valuation of your skill-set against salaries
• salary negotiation

Yes, I did mention commercial support for Perl, but the largest customer's admin services provider said that they are not interested in supporting yet another tool if it is only used in a few odd cases (debatable). They expect the software vendor to support such tools.

If we write a solution that uses Apache for some reason (e.g., suExec), then we must support Apache. In order for us to do this project with Perl and Linux we had to put it all on some back-end workstations that will be supported by an admin consultant.

Perl and Python are gaining some de facto acceptance in these larger companies, but they still require a lot of work to get approved.

Intended as humorous or not, you are correct: Java is the only widely accepted portable language, among the autos here in metro-Detroit. We are using a combination of Perl, jsp, and a little xml (awesome for creating and parsing config files!) to get the job done in our current project. But Java can be a pig at times, so I try to do the bulk of the grunt work in Perl.