I've never slammed C vs. Perl (at least, not before this comment) but here's my take.

Like others have said, there's no single best tool; you can only discuss whether a given tool is good in a given context. When people talk about whether a programming language is "good", they probably have a prototypical job in mind that provides the context for their judgement. And I'll wager that we talk about "using Perl", what most monks have in the back of their mind would involve string munging, dynamic manipulation of arrays and hashes. And these are much easier in Perl compared to C. Not impossible, but in Perl it's so easy it's fun; in C, these things are (imho) a chore.

In other words, for my "default programming job", Perl makes C look bad.

-- Frag.