Well, not to interrupt the name calling going on with Perl6, but:

I was working on ETL for a datawharehouse. At the time, it was in the top 10 largest warehouses in the world. I was getting streamed binary data that was pretty complex. I had prototyped it in perl, but it was taking longer to process the data than it took to receive it. I ended up using my main ax (C/C++) to get it up and running.

This was, however, about 10 years ago. Although I can't cry poor in terms of CPU and RAM (as I recall, I had an E10K with 40CPUS and 20G of RAM or something. I'd love to give it another shot with a newer version of perl. But I don't recall perl being really good a bit-manip.

Example: I'd get 4 numbers to decode. The first was 3 bits, then 4 bits, then 7 bits, then 2 bits. This wasn't pretty in any language, but really nasty in perl. Not to mention the little/big endian issues to compensate for and getting data that doesn't line up nicely with byte boundries is pretty yucky as well.

Footnote: That was some of the most fun I've had in programming ever.