While not necessarily a "wrong" answer, I think this is kind of a bad answer to the original question.

If you're doing this "seriously" for something, then yes you're going to want to throw something bare metal and these days probably GPU powered at it. However for the purposes of learning how they work and how they're implemented and solved I think something like perl (or python; bleh) is going to be perfectly reasonable and performant for the type of examples you'd encounter in problems. People used to solve these things with slide rules and pencil/paper. If your (again, experimental learning) implementation to solve the hairiest problem in your textbook takes 2 minutes rather than 10 seconds that's not really going to be an issue the tens of times you might be running it.

And as to the OP not being able to understand the python examples: if you're going to be programming seriously go ahead and take the time to get a reading familiarity of python (the Pascal of the naught-ies . . .). Even if you stick with Perl as your primary language it's worthwhile to be able to digest things in other languages because there's going to be times like this where you can't find something off the shelf. To say nothing of being exposed to other language approaches helps you improve your programming in general.