If you honestly just wanted to know what people think perl is best at, why start with a bunch of negative (and untrue) comments?

I like perl for what it is and I use it for a lot of programming-related tasks. I'm amazed at how easy it is to get things done with a few lines of code. I've no reason to want to be negative about perl.

I thought it was something like that. You really can't take comments at Slashdot as indicative of anything beyond one person's opinion. I mean, that article is about PHP, so naturally one would expect to see a lot of pro-PHP sentiment in it.

Re-read what you posted and try to imagine how it would sound to someone who doesn't know the context of your thinking when you wrote it. It comes off sounding like "Everyone hates perl. Do you think it's good for anything?" I don't think you meant to do that, but you have to consider your tone if you really want to get good answers from people.

The reason I said those comments were untrue is that, well, they are. Large sites (Amazon, Yahoo, TicketMaster, Morgan Stanley, etc.) are doing major things with perl. Yahoo uses PHP now as well, but they haven't stopped using perl. There are lots of PHP fan sites on the web, but that's partly because it appeals to an audience of wannabe web designers, and has no good equivalent to CPAN for putting up shared code. PHP has some serious issues with lack of namespaces, confusing function names, etc. which many beginning programmers won't even understand as problems, never having worked on a complicated project or used those features in another language.

Java -- I assume you're referring to the guy claiming that only J2EE is fast enough to build a site like CNN? I've seen many benchmarks involving web apps and file munging where perl comes out faster than Java. Very few large sites are actually built in Java (eBay comes to mind, but that's it). I would say Java is usually chosen for political reasons, not for technical ones.