I still find perl to be pretty sweet for handling old data formats. Need to extract something out of an old foxpro DBF file? Perl has some great tools for that.

I still find perl to be pretty sweet for handling old data formats. Need to extract something out of an old foxpro DBF file? Perl has some great tools for that. Have a collection of excel files with the formats ~MIXED TOGETHER~ between xlsx and xls, and don't want to deal with using two seperate libraries in python or whatever? Perl is pretty sweet for that, handles both formats transparently -- I think they even have it as the example on their front page. I had asked to write something in python at one job and my boss was like no, the call stack gets way too big and it uses too much memory, and you're installing an interpreter which may introduce security problems. Write it in Perl, it's included in the OS. I really wonder how correct he was on that performance stuff but it wasn't an unpleasant experience given my skill level in that language at the time. I think perl's major weak point is that it's kind of hard to read if you don't know it.