Perl was Y2K compliant before "Y2K" was a buzzword. See
Tom Christiansen's essay on
Y2K and Perl for all of the gory details.
Perl is not tied to any one vendor
Perl isn't tied to the health of a company or the
whims of stockholders. Perl will still be supported even if the
stock market crashes or Silicon Valley slides into the ocean.
Perl lets you do things your way
Don't be trapped by a vendor's proprietary development tools! Perl
can talk to most major databases and is able to administer
most operating systems so that you can build tools that solve
your needs, rather than what the vendor thinks you
need.
Many vendors have Perl development tools
Many products, such as Cybercash's e-commerce product,
Cash Register, ship with Perl development tools. If you
already have Perl skills in your enterprise, you'll be able to
leverage those products more quickly than your competitors.
Perl is cross-platform
Although Perl started out on Unix, it runs on the
Macintosh and on Microsoft platforms, along with many other
operating systems. Developers can easily produce
cross-platform programs by following the guidelines in the
Perl documentation. Even Microsoft supports the development
of Perl by working with ActiveState Tool Corp.
to keep Perl running on Win32 and NT. If
Microsoft likes Perl, shouldn't you?
Perl is open source software
Perl isn't a black-box. Anyone can look at the source,
and many have. This means bugs get spotted and fixed
sooner, and intermediate releases and patches are available
very quickly. You don't have to wait for a big company's
telephone support to tell you to upgrade when the new
version is available.
Perl is mature
Perl has been around since 1987 - several years before the Web even. There
has been plenty of time to shake the bugs out to deliver a stable product. It's
now in version 5. Are your other tools as mature as Perl?
Perl is a high level language
High level languages speed up the development process. If you
need a prototype for a big project, you can get it done very quickly in
Perl (although many have reported that the prototype was so good it became
the production version). Programmers spend less time thinking about things
like memory managament and variable typing and more time on what the product
does best.
Perl handles memory management internally
Perl handles
memory management so that programmers don't have to spend time creating memory
management bugs which are the most frequent source of security holes.
Perl is secure
Perl has a special "taint" mode that closely scrutinizes user
input to avoid common security problems. Using Perl's "taint" mode forces
programmers to code more carefully.
Perl works with existing C libraries
Through either the XS or SWIG interfaces, Perl programs can use your
legacy C libraries.