Hi,

You said: "Perl being a software mostly used to generate reports(that's what I read)" ...

To clarify: the statement was *somewhat* true from about 1987 through about 1994. Beginning with Perl 5.0 the language began to support lexical variables, references, objects and loading non-core modules. Beginning in 1995 the CPAN has hosted thousands of tested, peer-reviewed, third-party extensions to the language that enable programmers to tackle almost any task you can name without having to reinvent wheels. Beginning with Perl 5.004 in 1997 Perl became the dominant language for building web applications, and while other languages have since been developed and are more widely implemented today, Perl is still one of the top programming environments for the some of the most advanced and heavily trafficked web APIs in use and under development today. Meanwhile Perl has established itself as the language of choice in many fields that could be described as forms of "generating reports," bioinformatics perhaps foremost among them. It is also widely used to prototype computation-intensive tasks, eg financial analyses, when the final products are to be deployed using faster implementations. Etcetera ... I cannot complete the list as I have to get back to work using Perl to build interfaces between big commercial APIs that cannot talk to each other ;-)

Characterizing Perl as being limited to, or even most useful for, any one thing is belied by both the reality on the ground and by Perl's mottoes/nicknames "There Is More Than One Way To Do It," "The Duct Tape of the Internet," and "The Swiss Army Chainsaw" of programming, among others. It's an *old* chestnut, like nearly 25 years out of date!

Hope this helps!