I do agree with you. But as far as my experience goes, I think that Perl is best for general programming, and if speed is an issue, C(++) should be used. But from within Perl, that would mean, writing most stuff in Perl itself, and use the speed-needing code in C, and link it to Perl with XS.

I've used lots of environments, Prolog, Pascal, C (a little), Mapper, Progress 4GL, REXX, but never found a language that suited for so many different tasks like Perl does.

I don't know anything about LISP, but I can't imagine that it would be worth learning if Perl speeds up my productivity as much as it does...

Jouke Visser, Perl 'Adept'