We used to call this kind of thinking "management by magazine, but with the way tech rags have been dropping, maybe we need a new name:

I was talking to people from one such company last night. The Powers That Be at this company have announced that Perl is no longer their language of choice for web systems and that over time (probably a lot of time) systems will be rewritten in a combination of Java and PHP. Management have started to refer to Perl-based systems as "legacy"€ and to generally disparage it. This attitude has seeped through to non-technical business users who have started to worry if developers mention a system that is written in Perl. Business users, of course, don'€™t want nasty old, broken Perl code. They want the shiny new technologies.

There's hardly a shortage of Perl skills out there, so the common argument you see tossed around about Smalltalk is kind of a red herring. For too many IT people, it's all about the shiny. Once the enterprisey types get their hands on the process, you end up hearing nonsense like this...