The bias against scripting languages is really just a bias against change. Change is expensive and painful. Having eveyone code in their favorite language results in chaos. Change can and does happen, no one used Java seriously 5 years ago. Java might be the bridge that brings people to Perl/Python/Ruby by demonstrating that CPUs are super fast and coding in C is going the way of coding in ASM (use it when you have to, and no more). You might like perl better than X, but companies have standards because it keeps their costs down. Perl has a large user base but it is still easier to find candidates that already know industrial C++ or Java.

That said, some of the complaints against C|C++|Java above could be applied to perl (OK, not the its-too-verbose one). Consider that it isn't possible to write an obfu in python. This is a good thing. Perl6 better become reality soonish (it addresses most of the warts of coding large scale apps in perl) or Python is going to eat its lunch. Ruby has an outside chance of doing the same, but misses the mark IMO.

Note, I'm just talking about apps here b/c the question was really about large scale development. Perl's sed and awk heritage make it unbeatable for text file manipulation, sys admin tasks, Makefile helpers, etc.

-jackdied