Perl was, and is still, a remarkably powerful language. I used it starting in the early 90s to generate correct input decks for my simulations on supercomputers. Then I used it to orchestrate my (many) runs across a wide range of systems. We had small grants of CPU time, and lots of "you can use this box on nights and weekends" type access. Getting grants in the early 90s in a condensed matter theory group was hard, even had one larger one of ours cut so its money could be diverted to another (infamous) project.

We had to make do with less. Perl was one of those tools that let us get our work done, as it enabled us to automate our tasks. Easily.

Later, I worked at SGI when all the kerfluffle about DVD decoding/playback was about. My recollection was that Perl was used for that as well[1].

When I started my company, most of my code was in Perl, with a little in C. I was using it daily until we closed in 2017. Now its a bit more sporadic.

At the day job, its Python everywhere. I've been told people would laugh at using Perl. Kind of a shame, as I see multiple pages of code that could be easily reworked into a far more readable, easy to reason about and comprehend small set of Perl code.

Perl really isn't great at mathematical operations, but then again, neither is Python without its C/C++/Fortran extensions. To Perl's discredit, the whole FFI bit took too many years for them to get right. Its there now, but the momentum is now behind other languages.

Again, a shame, as Perl is unmatched for its data wrangling capability. I didn't need 2 languages for the work I did in Perl. One sufficed, as I was happy to have simple language to reason about/support. This is curiously, why I like Julia so much.

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2800097/seven-lines-of...