Perl is good for a competent coder who doesn't work as a developer, occasionally has a one-off coding task, and wants to incorporate a code excerpt from the web

Perl is good for a competent coder who doesn't work as a developer, occasionally has a one-off coding task, and wants to incorporate a code excerpt from the web and immediately execute it (and then throw the code away). Languages with whitespace as syntax often fail the "immediately execute" requirement.