Only half? I must be slacking. But I only enjoy
watching "perl golf", I don't
play. I concentrate more on being clear and re-usable. Since I also have spoken C since forever, I can code perl without thinking - you can do C in perl, kind of, it's just easier. And if you really have to crunch numbers, it can call out to a C shared lib anyway. Larry Wall did a good job there, and since he also wrote the runtime, there are no compromises like with Java or .NET - it's fast.
And then
there's the CPAN. Nearly everything you could ever want is already there, and with a short learning curve and decent documentation. Learning MFC for windows (I stopped before that crummy .NET junk) was a real pain, but it was nice after that. Sadly, CPAN haven't yet updated Gladexml.pm yet to take output from any glade newer than 3.6 yet, so I can't do guis for perl in glade unless I run an older linux (in this case Ubuntu 10.04) in a virtual machine and use an old glade. Too bad, it was almost as good as dev studio for windows, which no longer lives here...I'm 100% linux on campus, barring the odd VB machine I never even run.
I might look into updating that pm myself, it's too good to lose access to easy GUI's in perl. It's just that I despise XML, and that's what changed.
My perl programs to do say, 4d plotting, are already a fat factor fewer lines than they would have been in C or C++...it's good enough.
Leaves more room for meaningfull comments. Other interpreted languages don't give me enough control over when garbage collection happens, so I can't use them for anything real time, which is about all I do anyway.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.