I've grown to like PERL very much over the past year or so that I've been using it, but not in all cases. I've been doing lots of programming for my astronomy research projects over the past few years, and I've found a combination of C and PERL to be perfect for me. They're both great, but only in certain cases.
Most of the time I have to deal with enormous sets of data, and I often have to perform repetitive tasks on the data in my analysis. For the quick and simple stuff (like performing a few calculations on a particular column of the data set) nothing beats PERL in my experience. I can write a quick PERL script in no time that does the job without any hassles or annoying syntax rules. However, if I need to perform calculations that are more computationally intensive (such as matching stars from two sets -- each numbering 250,000+ -- which can easily involve billions of distance calculations even if I make the script as efficient as possible) PERL really becomes less effective. If I write two identical scripts to perform something like this in PERL and in C, I usually find that the C script can do in an hour what PERL would take 24+ hours to complete.
However, I would not endorse using something like C all the time, because it's inherently more time consuming to write a C script to do something quick and simple that a PERL script could easily handle. So I've found a nice balance between those two.
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