Ahem. Sorry something in my throat.

1. Subjective, ignored.

2. The regex engine in Perl has more features than the ones in Python, Ruby and Java - and is most likely faster and more robust due to how long it has been part a first-class part of the language. I've seen speed trials that are less than two years old against Python/Perl and Java/Perl. No evidence for Ruby. C++ is apples-and-oranges.

3. I think the speed in terms of development time of dealing with large files, is where the "fast" comes from. Perl was designed with processing text files in mind, every aspect of the language is geared for it. It has been doing it for a long time and is very good at it. Try recursively processing a directory tree of files in Java to make a histogram of the occurances of words. Now do it in Perl. You will see the difference.

4. CPAN. Enough said.

-Andrew.