The way that I tend to think of “very-high level languages” like Perl is that they represent a large wad of very cleverly-written "C" and assembler code that I didn't have to write or debug. The moment my program starts, it's running within the envelope of what is actually a very complicated runtime environment... no thought required. Tools like Perl allow us to focus on what matters to a particular application, and to ignore (or simply take for granted) all the rest. For all its warts, Perl definitely moves the freight.

I'm very reluctant to blame any project failure at all upon the language(s) or tools that were used to build it. The true cause of the failure usually has two ears, and a vacuum in-between. :-D