In my experience, Perl is the most usable and productive language I have ever worked with. I've worked with Assembler (Modifying Opcodes on the fly, WHOO HOO!), Pascal, a little Lisp, C, C++, Java and of course Perl.

Is it best for everything? No. It's not suited to low level stuff like video, disk drivers where speed is an issue. Hard Real Time applications? Probably not. Of course you could write the drivers in C, etc and wrap it up in a nice Perl interface. :)

Also, many embedded applications are out because of the very limited resources and speed.

-Lee

"To be civilized is to deny one's nature."