This is the story of my professional life:

I always offer the solution to my clients in Perl first. Many times they say Java and I respectfully walk away...

They are usually bewildered by this and ask me to sit down. I explain to them that I am unwilling to work with Java and prefer Perl, two hands down. It caches their curiosity, and many times they believe me but still insist that I can't do it in Perl (arguing about the lack of Perl programmers). If they comprimise for PHP or Ruby, Lisp or C, I take the job.

As a side note, PHP is actually a good thing for Perl. It is very popular and it gives you the opportunity to sell Perl as the real thing ;-) . It is much easier to evangelize a PHP crowd than a Java one.

During the project, the use Perl becomes inevitable, of course ;-] So I start by making Perl scrips that make the project more and more dependent on Perl (meaning I get at least CPAN installed on the company servers, this is a major victory!). ETL is usually a good place to start, I mean, every project requires some sort of data transformation and loading.

Load testing is usually another place where I plant the Perl seed. Stuff like www mechanize and alike usually do the trick. Little by little I evangelize the client on Perl, whilst the Java freaks start pulling all the papers and studies on how Perl is dead and Pathfinder uses Java and all that crap. I don't usually fight them directly, but with impresive results, which the Java teams rarely accomplish. Meanwhile, Perl silently spreads like weed...

In the end I end up using at least 30% Perl in every project, hoping that next time I'm called to the negotiation table I will have a chance to do a pure Perl project. Has happened only once in the past 2 years, but I am sure that my strategy will have its fruit eventually.

Oh, and BTW, I don't do Windows projects either.

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