Perl lacks the heavy duty statistical analysis tools that are needed to do really good data mining.
There is no good reason why they couldn't be written, apart from the obvious "I don't have the time/need". At the moment perl may be great at transforming data, but it ain't very hot at analysisng it.
Another reason may be that it the sort of calculations needed for analysing stats are often heavy-duty floating point and other number ops, which perl is only ok at (rather than being great at).
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Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.