I hope iPhone users don't freak out when their Java apps suddenly start printing 500 line stack traces.

Of course not, they will scroll flawlessly across the retina display.

It's flexible, powerful, and easy to extend. 84,296 modules are freely available from the CPAN (at least when I checked; the upload rate is staggering). It has an immense culture of quality and testing. It's amazingly portable. It scales from the freshest novice writing baby Perl to large-scale applications which must not fail, written by experienced professionals. It's malleable; you can program in a compiler-checked subset of the language or express yourself in the most clear or (if you don't care about maintainability) the most expressive, creative way possible.

It has amazing libraries for network access and databases. It sets the standard for text processing. It's been an integral part of usable Unix installations for years. You can find it just about everywhere, and you can do just about anything with it.

Hey, what the hell, man? Wasn't, like, everyone bashing Perl? Just kidding, of course. My limited experience with Perl is "Wow, seriously? That easy?" after hours of gazing at code and docs.

Is Beijing controlling even this aspect of the Olympics? I thought censoring of free speech and the media was the only thing they were censoring!

This has nothing to do with the Olympics being held in Beijing. The Code of Points has been revised in 2006 and has been already used at the European Championships recently.