I came back to Perl about 18 months ago, after working as a sysadmin for a couple of months and being fed up with Python's unicode handling (Python 2.x, I haven

I came back to Perl about 18 months ago, after working as a sysadmin for a couple of months and being fed up with Python's unicode handling (Python 2.x, I haven't given Python 3.x a try, yet). I do not think Perl is a pretty language, but I have come to appreciate how useful it is. If all you want is a smallish application (roughly, less than 1 KLOC), especially if you're only going to use it once or maybe a handful of times, no other language I have met can keep up. And for the kind of problem I typically use Perl for - reading, say, a CSV file or an Excel spreadsheet, filtering the data according to some criterion, fetching and adding data from an external source, say, an LDAP directory or a relational database, then inserting the result into a database or emitting another CSV file - it is also surprisingly hard to beat Perl's runtime performance, especially its regex engine. I'm not saying it can't be done, but for a program you're essentially throwing away after a week or so, it's usually not worth the hassle.