[Bloomington-normal-pm] Perl for business

[Erik Costlow]

A non-technical question, but one that I'm interested in...
How prevalant is it out in the industry? What kind of acceptance does it have?

The reason I ask is that I've been having trouble using it lately (I've been coding perl for a few years now). It's a very useful language, and with CPAN, you can accomplish a lot in perl with little effort. However, when I try to demonstrate things for non-perl coders, they say it should have been written in something else.
For example, our ACS club at Illinois State University just had a coding competition for C++ and Java. I wanted to enter the C++ competition and wrap perl into my C code via perl.h, but I was told that it wasn't allowed. (It was a fair call under their guidelines, but I still wanted to use perl)
Another one of my instructors wanted our class to write a network application, so I called IO::Socket and wrote both the client and server really quick. I was told that I couldn't use it because it didn't demonstrate what he wanted.

The slogan for the Chicago PM is "You've got to love a language that's banned because it makes problems too easy to solve." This is true, but what are the advantages to knowing this when I can't use it anywhere except for my own projects?

-Erik Costlow