There are languages for which it makes sense to try to be the fastest at some set of things: fastest program initialization, fastest network socket library, fas

There are languages for which it makes sense to try to be the fastest at some set of things: fastest program initialization, fastest network socket library, fastest regular expressions. That's all nice, but in the vast majority of programming work, "fastest learning curve from hello,world to low-error-count CRUD program" is the best spec. Perl actually has a shot at that, but there's nothing much special about it that couldn't be done by Python or Ruby.