Shell. You can approach Perl viewing it as an alternative to Python / Ruby / JavaScript, but that’s not the only way to look at it. Another is to look at it as

Shell. You can approach Perl viewing it as an alternative to Python / Ruby / JavaScript, but that’s not the only way to look at it. Another is to look at it as a sh / sed / awk upgrade, and it absolutely excels in that. It’s easy to ‘shell out’, Perl adds more convenient data structures and keeps affordances to play well with other tools. It’s also very backwards-compatible, so if you want a small script for personal use that will not need you to do maintenance busywork — base Perl is the way to go.