In a recent interview at LWN Larry Wall provided an explanation for why one might use Perl to script a task even when Perl is not the optimal language for that task. Larry wrote:

People don't want to have to use Perl plus other things. If there is a job that really ought to be written in C++ or Java or Ruby or Python or something like that, but they like Perl, and Perl may not be the best tool yet for it, but they would like it to be.

So rather than learning a different language, they just want to extend Perl toward what is better for that. So I think it it's still laziness."

When Larry speaks of laziness, however, he means it as praise. The programmer is avoiding unnecessary effort, in this case the unnecessary effort of learning a new language.

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