Shell Programming and Scripting

My project is to write a script to get/put data to another server, be able to log input and output files, have some sort of security for the password, and any errors connecting send a email to a group of people.

I've seen examples of perl, java being called by Unix scripts, etc. I've even seen outside software such as kermit being called.
I wanted to know what others are using when writing Unix/Linux scripts to use ftp?

Nowadays, I tend to use Perl. If it is very, very simple I might use a .netrc script but that gives no easy way to trap errors.

Kermit has good scripting for FTP too - I just tend toward Perl because it's always there and Kermit is not.