If your formula is non-trivial and original, patent it. If it's a good enough idea otherwise, get a good NDA together and seek investors.

Once you have clear ownership of something secrecy is sort of beside the point and some would even argue it a handicap. I wish someone would steal one of my ideas and make a million dollars because then I could sue them for ten million. (Sidebar: I have had to file DCMA notices a couple of times but I doubt anyone made better than coffee money stealing my work.)

On the Perl front, if you're mathematically/analytically inclined you can write useful Perl code in a week or two with one of the better books to guide you. Perl is one of the hardest languages to master but one of the easiest, if not the easiest, with which to write useful code. You can get plenty of excellent help here if you get stuck on pieces of code.