I would not consider myself a perl advocate. I don't run around proselytizing about the wonderfulness of Perl. However, occasionally, someone will say something profoundly silly. Today, once again, I have heard the ridiculous claim that, "Perl is not a serious language." What the speaker typically means is that no real system could possibly be built using a toy language such as Perl. Since I have been building serious systems with Perl for the last 10 years I know that this claim is false. These days I simply laugh at the claim and go about my business.

Where I work we recently completed a large and lengthy project to re-architect our core technology. The entire project was written in Perl. The webserver on the frontend? Written in Perl. The servers making the business decisions? Written in Perl. The backend that serves up the data? Written in perl. This is a web service that receives millions of hits per day. Nearly every hit requires a fairly complex and unique set of rules to be followed. The whole thing was written in Perl.

To say that Perl is a toy is simply wrong.