That's so at odds with Perl's description of itself, as listed in perldoc:perl:

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Perl is a language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information. It's also a good language for many system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal).

Perl combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with those languages should have little difficulty with it. (Language historians will also note some vestiges of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC-PLUS.) Expression syntax corresponds closely to C expression syntax. Unlike most Unix utilities, Perl does not arbitrarily limit the size of your data--if you've got the memory, Perl can slurp in your whole file as a single string. Recursion is of unlimited depth. And the tables used by hashes (sometimes called "associative arrays") grow as necessary to prevent degraded performance. Perl can use sophisticated pattern matching techniques to scan large amounts of data quickly. Although optimized for scanning text, Perl can also deal with binary data, and can make dbm files look like hashes. Setuid Perl scripts are safer than C programs through a dataflow tracing mechanism that prevents many stupid security holes.

If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little faster, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C, then Perl may be for you. There are also translators to turn your sed and awk scripts into Perl scripts.
But wait, there's more...

Begun in 1993 (see perlhist), Perl version 5 is nearly a complete rewrite that provides the following additional benefits:

• modularity and reusability using innumerable modules
  Described in perlmod, perlmodlib, and perlmodinstall.

  embeddable and extensible

  Described in perlembed, perlxstut, perlxs, perlcall, perlguts, and xsubpp.

  roll-your-own magic variables (including multiple simultaneous DBM implementations)

  Described in perltie and AnyDBM_File.

  subroutines can now be overridden, autoloaded, and prototyped

  Described in perlsub.

  arbitrarily nested data structures and anonymous functions

  Described in perlreftut, perlref, perldsc, and perllol.

  object-oriented programming

  Described in perlobj, perlboot, perltoot, perltooc, and perlbot.

  compilability into C code or Perl bytecode

  Described in B and B::Bytecode.

  support for light-weight processes (threads)

  Described in perlthrtut and Thread.

  support for internationalization, localization, and Unicode

  Described in perllocale and utf8.

  lexical scoping

  Described in perlsub.

  regular expression enhancements

  Described in perlre, with additional examples in perlop.

  enhanced debugger and interactive Perl environment, with integrated editor support

  Described in perldebtut, perldebug and perldebguts.

  POSIX 1003.1 compliant library

  Described in POSIX.

Okay, that's *definitely* enough hype.

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-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
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