Regarding your update, there are some very strong other references about who uses Perl:
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The Linux Journal article in which Larry Wall says, "A couple of years ago, I ran into someone at a trade show who was representing the NSA (National Security Agency). He mentioned to someone else in passing that he'd written a filter program in Perl, so without telling him who I was, I asked him if I could tell people that the NSA uses Perl. His response was, ``Doesn't everyone?'' So now I don't tell people the NSA uses Perl. I merely tell people the NSA thinks everyone uses Perl. They should know, after all."
- Larry's State of the Onion 9 speech in which he mentions that Perl was designed to deal with needs for programming projects within an NSA project.
- Someone's info on what could be important for an internship with the NSA which mentions programming in Matlab, Mathematica, maple, C++, Java, C, Unix, Linux, Perl, Python, and MAGMA
- Searching http://www.nsa.gov for 'Perl' using the built-in search returns no fewer than 80 results. Many of these are examples of how to test security on SELinux.
- The NSA guide to securing IIS 5.0, which states that setting up Perl (and ASP) properly under IIS with handler configuration is an acceptable security move while setting up external executables under IIS is dangerous.
If the NSA doesn't know information system security, your boss has no one left to trust.
Update: fixed a couple of typos.
