Indeed. And the age shows. In the section "Perl Wins the Comparison", they explain Perl's advantages:

  Good database connectivity gave Perl the nod over C++, 
  and since Sandell and Johnson received project text files 
  in various formats, Perl's ability to parse text with 
  regular expressions was much better than COBOL or 
  Oracle's PL/SQL.

These aren't the comparisons that would be made today, though I am very proud of Perl, having beaten COBOL and PL/SQL in a regex contest!

I also enjoyed the time-travel qualities of the conclusion of that section:

  They wrote the Web applications in Jscript, and other 
  parts of the system in Visual Basic. Some functions were 
  written in PL/SQL so they could be accessible from other 
  languages using the system. "If we did the project again, 
  we would probably strive to make more of it in Perl," 
  Sandell concedes. But with so little time, they couldn't 
  ask team members to learn a new language.

JScript no longer exists, unless it's a misnomer for JavaScript. Is it considered best practice to use code rather than stored procedures? (The question is genuine -- I'm not a software developer.)

JScript is Microsoft's name for ECMAScript.

It would be a nice to have a convention of adding a date on articles older than N years.

I propose a simple (from 2001) appended on to the title.

Or [2001]

Sorry, should have put the date in. The reason I posted it was because I thought people would find it interesting in the light of the recent Perl success stories published here.