I use Perl all the time for short programs, up to a few hundred lines. The main advantages of Perl are that it's already installed on all the systems I use and

I use Perl all the time for short programs, up to a few hundred lines. The main advantages of Perl are that it's already installed on all the systems I use and the language itself is not changing: Perl scripts I wrote 20 years ago still work, and I have a vague hope that Perl scripts I write today will still work in 20 years' time. Maybe Python is now stable enough for me to consider it as an alternative to Perl but I've bad experiences trying to run Python scripts from 20 years ago. In any case, Python is less concise for the sort of programs I write, and although Perl has a reputation for being unreadable it really depends on who's writing it. I write in a subset of Perl, with "use strict", that I find to be readable. I find Perl stops being convenient at about the point where you need complex data structures and modules.