From time to time I wonder that, too. Here's my somewhat shy reply...being just a newbie to the Monks.

I have been using Perl for about 4 years now. I am a Chief Sys Engineer building and flying satellites.

Our satellite integration and testing teams have (for several years before I got involved with Perl) used Perl to script and automate their testing to confirm that our satellites are ready to go into space. I got involved in Perl just to understand what my I&T teams were doing...and I got hooked.

We use the same ground systems for testing that we also use to fly the satellites and I am also one of many Flight Directors for flying the satellites. I realized that the same scripts that we used for testing could, with a little modifications, enhance and improve our on-orbit oversight and management of the satellites. We have since begun using Perl as a tool to much more flexibly and fluidly manage some of our on-orbit operations.

I am not much of a programmer, so I try to utilize some of our Perl gurus to do most of the script development work. But I dabble and do some of my own, too.

The Perl language's ability to rapidly prototype, try little ideas or snippets of code, often it's compactness, and its cross-platform portability (which allows us, often, to prototype ideas on PCs and then implement them on Solaris workstations) makes Perl ideal and, certainly, it is our language-of-choice.

None of our scripts are very complicated and none but a few are more than 50 lines of code (typically). The power and expressiveness of Perl has allowed us, even with such small scripts, to implement some pretty powerful capabilities. For example, one such script is a meta-interpreter that allows our flight controllers to specify functional spacecraft activities (e.g., "go to this place and do this within such-and-such constraints") and auto-generate the spacecraft command loads (often several hundred commands) for the satellite that are auto-verified, repeatedble, and reliable...a task that used to take my controllers over a day or two. They can do the same task in only a few minutes.

Perl has become "my (and our) friend" and contributes to satellite test and operations for us.