Science. I was told that perl was no good for numerics (handling floats, etc.), so I took that as a challenge. The system we've designed is almost all pure perl (TM?): it reads in binary housekeeping and instrument data from our experiment and outputs science-ready binary data on the output side. All the while, it keeps track of the data with heavy use of DBD::mysql. I like the rich set of tools that perl offers (OOP, closures, ties, for example), without forcing you to use any of them (I'm looking at you, Python!). Oh, and there is some web stuff there too...

Gamma-Ray Rob