Seriously, Perl is an okay language for quick and dirty things of a tiny/small size. Yeah, it's not the best language for a large development project, but if you do need to parse /etc/passwd or something, not only it's perfectly good as-is, but you'll certainly find something on CPAN that already does it well.
I can't imagine why would one want to do that kind of thing in C. It's just unnecessarily painful, and you'll spend 90% of the time on doing things that don't solve the actual task you need to be solved.
Yeah, in modern times it's gone way downhill, but that's mostly if you intend to do something big with it. I wouldn't use it to start a new, fully featured CMS. But for sysadmin type stuff as an alternative to sh/awk it's still just as usable as ever.
I know loads of people loved Perl, and I'm not suggesting that my perspective is mainstream or even defensible. I'm just saying that I was a young sysadmin in the "bad old days", but that I didn't like Perl. Of course I did use an awful lot of Perl scripts.
That said, I have to revise my original comment. I forgot that I was a big fan of Tcl/Tk/Expect back in the day. So it's not like my taste is better than anyone else's :)
Seriously, Perl is an okay language for quick and dirty things of a tiny/small size. Yeah, it's not the best language for a large development project, but if you do need to parse /etc/passwd or something, not only it's perfectly good as-is, but you'll certainly find something on CPAN that already does it well.
I can't imagine why would one want to do that kind of thing in C. It's just unnecessarily painful, and you'll spend 90% of the time on doing things that don't solve the actual task you need to be solved.
Yeah, in modern times it's gone way downhill, but that's mostly if you intend to do something big with it. I wouldn't use it to start a new, fully featured CMS. But for sysadmin type stuff as an alternative to sh/awk it's still just as usable as ever.