So, er, why did people downvote this? Seriously. I'm quite curious. Just wanted to get that all-votes-cast XP bonus and needed a node to downvote or something?

How does Perl relate to C(++)? Perl does string munging like nothing else on the planet. Perl has integrated hashes that work incredibly well. Perl has a remarkably transparent object model, far more so than any other OO language that I've encountered (this excludes Smalltalk, for the record). Perl is incredibly idiomatic, almost as much so as vi and its clones. Perl has regular expressions that make the Goddess envious. For small programs, glue, system administration and data munging, Perl is an ideal language. And Perl has CPAN. CPAN is so effective a resource that it makes all of OOP's claims about software reuse seem lame by comparison.

On the other hand, Perl doesn't give you much access to the computer's internals. Perl won't let you dictate much in the way of memory layout. Perl won't let you specify whether you're using 8, 16, 32, or 64 bits for a particular integer. Perl doesn't generate predictable machine code. If you want to do something really, really fast, Perl probably isn't what you want, and if you want to massage your VGA card into giving your 400x300x8bit resolution, Perl probably isn't what you want either.

Oh, and C+ isn't a mainstream language, it's a soft drink.