For me (in the data world) perl works really well within the unix philosophy. Basically my perl programs are small, simple, reusable, and can be piped together.

For me (in the data world) perl works really well within the unix philosophy. Basically my perl programs are small, simple, reusable, and can be piped together. My typical perl program is less than 200 lines and works on standard input/output (and perhaps a file or two provided as parameters). This simplicity and modularity means that I can pass my perl tools around to my team members and they don't need to read the code; instead they can read the documentation and unit tests and treat it as a tool. This takes advantage of perl's strengths, which are speed of development and built-in text processing. Also, once you know perl you can easily write "one-liners", which have made me incredibly efficient in certain cases.