It gets the job done, is an easy language for people to get into, has enough flexibility to adapt to a huge number of programming patterns, and has a large and active community. We write real applications with it that help scientists find cures for diseases.
Would there be any possibility of remote work from Europe? My current job is building / maintaining the LIMS system for a sequencing centre in Spain. I did that in Django, but I did years of Perl before hand.
No. :( Our users -- lab folks -- are not particularly computer savvy, and everyone benefits from the face time, especially when it comes to translating what they said on a JIRA issue to their actual problem.
