Perl is in use on millions of computers, and it’s one of the fastest-growing programming languages available. Why is this? We’ve already seen a number of reasons for this in the introduction, but I think it’s worth restating them briefly here.
Perl is not a difficuly language to learn. It’s a language that tries to shape itself around the way humans think about problems and provides nothing contrary to their expectations. Perls’ designers believe that Perl is a populist language - and not just for the mathematicians and computer scientists of this world. I know of plenty of people with scientific and non-scientific backgrounds alike who successfully use Perl.