These are mostly the negative externalities of using computer code. It is no harder to collaborate with Perl than with R (been there done that) or Julia (have

These are mostly the negative externalities of using computer code. It is no harder to collaborate with Perl than with R (been there done that) or Julia (have not done that. PDL is addressing your point about libraries. Horses for courses. If your research involves streams of text (a lot of things are streams of text) and transforming them then Perl is a likely contender as the best choice.