whizkid, the budget thing is from personal experience. A product like Visual Studio, for example, tends to be extremely popular and you normally can't get that for free, legally. VC combines C++, VB and J in one single product with some nice, additional features. And if you need help, you will find a lot of materials for VS too. While there are also many free languages, many of them lack a good user-interface (or IDE) for the user to develop from. You might have to end up collecting all kinds of tools just to work properly with a single, free compiler. It just doesn't always integrate nicely together. But this is just personal experience. Anyway, from one of the Wiki's that I linked to, you can get a very nice overview of many available languages, both free and commercial.

About the Perl OS, according to this link, someone is working on it. One is called Perlix and is based upon the Linux kernel, thus not completely written in Perl. The other one is JKOS which isn't actually a real OS according to this article. So the real Perl OS is still work in progress...

EDIT: IDE = Integrated Development Environment...