Story often heard: "we've got a problem that's 200 lines of Perl or
2,000 lines of Java, and the boss wants me to use Java because he's
heard that Perl is bad."
This advocacy is done by insiders, and all we can do is help.
You're applying bottom-up pressure.
You can hope for viral transfer: the first successful project can be
used to argue for the second being done in Perl.