I wouldn't call having the de-facto standard for an advanced regular expression system, a full programming language and the entirety of the CPAN module system e

I wouldn't call having the de-facto standard for an advanced regular expression system, a full programming language and the entirety of the CPAN module system easily pulled in and used less powerful. I use sed for a lot of simple stuff, but I use Perl all the time for more advanced stuff. Perl is great for grabbing complex chunks out of a line and doing something with them that requires a bit of state. For example, writing a quick and dirty logfile parser to figure out how many requests and how many bytes were used by each IP over a time period (the time period limiting usually being a prior grep before being passed to Perl). I've probably taken 60 seconds to write out something to parse exactly what I want from a log hundreds of times.