The act of sorting languages by overall utility is an exercise that is unlikely to yield useful results, and measuring a language by how appealing typical applications are to the general public also seems rather silly to me. If GUI sophistication is the measure of a "true" language, then Perl is probably not going to show very well, though the tools to do good GUI development do exist as has already been pointed out. It may be that the kinds of tasks that Perl is most often applied to don't need or want a GUI front-end... unless you count your web browser!

I think what you may be seeing is the way Perl is viewed by the general 'net population, to whom VB or even Excel macros ar far more familiar and friendly, and Perl is cryptic and foreign. How that leads one to believe that data manipulation is not real work I am at a loss to explain. It sounds more like these people you are refering to are judging their languages by their user interfaces. That may be appropriate for some, but for me at least, data munging is by far more real and important than flashy interfaces (but then I'm not currently writing end-user applications).

I've coded seriously in many languages for my work and research, and though my Perl code is neither flashy nor whiz-bang, it certainly makes my job much easier (and more enjoyable) than anything else I've used. Try moving any other code from a DOS to a VAX to Win32 to LINUX without any significant modifications - Fortran always put up a big fight but Perl copes very well. In the end, it is how well a given language suits your specific task and environment that should determine whether you use it, and the huge code resource of CPAN combined with the awesome teaching power of The Monastery are two significant bonuses for me.

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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser

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