I'm sorry, I have to (strongly) disagree. I used Perl professionally for 5+ years. I was the one that always added bindings to C and C++ libraries. I wrote a

I'm sorry, I have to (strongly) disagree. I used Perl professionally for 5+ years. I was the one that always added bindings to C and C++ libraries. I wrote a massive OO network management system that used all kinds of meta-magic (keep in mind this was long before Moose, etc.) to deal with new kinds of computers coming into the system automatically that is, afaik, still running. And I'll never use Perl again for anything on purpose. I'm not a Python fanboy, but I don't find your library comment right at all. In fact, the time I used Python was because I had to add functionality to an older Perl project. Rather then write in Perl I rewrote the entire thing in Python (that is; I chose to use a language I didn't know at the time, rather then write Perl again). The resulting source code was one third the size (I counted) and much much clearer with more features added. I didn't have to download anything for Python while the old Perl code was using 4 or 5 CPAN modules. As for Java/Haskell, this is obviously not a fair comparison: Perl+CPAN vs. Java/Haskell standard libraries. If you include third party libraries for Java it should have far more code then any other language by now.