...Perl acceptance is getting a bit tougher these days...

I don't know about anyone else, but I have had absolutely no problems getting (mostly) pure Perl jobs, even in this crappy economy, in very large and very small companies. MasterCard, Motorola, Verizon, BankOne - they all have extremely large Perl codebases. Although I have no direct experience of this, former coworkers of mine speak of huge Perl/Sybase codebases in the NY trading houses.

Also, Perl is not the be-all-end-all of programming languages, just as Linux is not the be-all-end-all of operating systems. Although I am an open-source junkie, Win32 systems have a huge number of advantages, as does VB(A) as a programming language. If it wasn't for the untiring efforts of thousands of developers, Linux would have more bugs that Windows. (Frankly, many Linux apps do have more bugs than the corresponding Win32 apps. For the enterprise, I will still recommend MS Office over OpenOffice. I use it, but I'm a power user. Most people aren't.)

Power user - that is the important phrase in the above statement. Perl applications development on Unix/Linux is approaching the position that VisualC++ has on the Win32 system. For the standard user, PHP / VBA are good enough. My father, a banker, once told me that he didn't need more than that for what he was doing. I offered to help him out, giving me a Perl/MySQL solution, but he declined. He didn't want a Cadillac when a bike would get him by.

Perl development is, when done right, a Cadillac. You can RAD all you want, but to deploy something for the enterprise, you need an expert. Case in point - I just got hired on at a small company that's been trying to transform itself into a web-prescence. They had a number of very sharp people doing their development, but they were green in the ways of Perl/Apache. It takes someone who's seen it done before to make a web-prescence happen.

Contrast that to PHP (or VB) - a novice can put something up with one of those 21 Days books and it looks good! Sometimes, it looks better than what I can do with Perl. Now, can Perl do stuff PHP can't even dream of? Well, duh! VC++ is the same when compared to VB. But, they don't solve the same problem. Perl solves the problems that nothing else can solve. If something else can solve a problem better / faster / easier than Perl, then use it! To be a language-nazi is to be a fool. Languages are just tools. What you're saying is that you only want to use your specific super-duper-powertool. Well, what if the power goes out? Or, you don't have the 110-to-220 converter? Or, you just want to change a light bulb. My father just wanted to change a light bulb, so why should he have to go get his power-saw from the garage? A simple butterknife would do.