For my company, it's cross-platform and just works. It's file & data capabilities are powerful enough to deal with lots of miniature sized files from the render

For my company, it's cross-platform and just works. It's file & data capabilities are powerful enough to deal with lots of miniature sized files from the renderer. Perl just hovers them up and does whatever processing. We did test Python but it just felt clunky in it's habits and felt lacking in terms of performance such as stalling in building a dictionary list of files to work with. Perl may be one of the older languages, but it still holds strong. If Perl is supported for your $OS your script is guaranteed to execute. Sure, adjustments may have to be made if you're targeting the underside of the rainbow such as Windows but it's trivial for *nix hosts. Migrating from Ubuntu to Debian, BSD? -- 99.9% chance your script will run. I am bias, in that their isn't anything majority wrong with perl. It was used as the main language back in the 80's for a reason and Perl's ecosystem (cpan) is still pretty comprehensive and still holding weight. As it's not taught anymore due to newer trends this is causing it's shine to dull and it's overall presence dropping away. I wouldn't disagree that new languages boast optimism in to the future of programming technologies but with perl it has been battle tested and just works.