I love perl for regex scripts, where I need to quickly filter or transform a text file. I never liked it for other kinds of programming projects, for some reason to me it doesn’t feel as well suited to, say, numeric simulations.

> Naturally far more efficient

What does this mean exactly? One big reason for Python’s success in data science is numpy, which is far more efficient (especially on large data) than vanilla Python. I’m unaware of the state of the Perl ecosystem, does it have something similar?

> how come Perl lags far behind or gets dwarfed in data science by Python?

Perl seems to be lagging behind in general, no? Is there anything specific about data science where Perl should be shining?