> Perl... performance? You have to remember this idea comes from the late 90s when Java was slow as a dog, and Perl solidly cleaned the floor with other script

> Perl... performance? You have to remember this idea comes from the late 90s when Java was slow as a dog, and Perl solidly cleaned the floor with other scripting languages like Python, Tcl, (was Ruby even known then?). Perl even outpaced C++ for I/O related stuff due to the way Perl buffered input (or maybe the way C++ streams were so badly implemented). Of course a clean slate implement in C++ that avoided...well C++...and used mostly C style code would have cleaned the floor with Perl...but that was the state of C++ in the 90s. Yeah...Perl had its heyday.