We often hear the comment, "No IT Manager ever got fired for picking Java."

I have a counterexample at my present client. The IT managing director was pushed out at the beginning of last year, because of a Java project going horrendously over budget and off the rails. It was not the programming language that was at fault, but the project management (or lack of it). Redundancies were made in May, and ironically a large proportion of these had attended the Java certification courses.

Within the organisation, Java programming has acquired a bitter taste in the mouth. They are favouring C++ which is the language that the 5 year old "legacy" systems were written in.

In terms of Perl use and acceptance, I'm working on it. I do have Perl code in use in the production environment, for application monitoring and suchlike. They've also got a big downer on Open Source.