Perl is a Turing-complete language that runs on any platform and has maybe the longest-standing repository of open-source libraries. I haven't seen a benchmark recently, but I'd bet it still outperforms Python or node. But yeah, you'd be laughed out of any job for suggesting it be used for any serious work. It lost the PR war years ago.
I used it as my primary language for several years and it's extremely capable and intuitive. The learning curve of it's syntax is really only slightly longer than any other language. And I have the very strong opinion that syntax contributes less than 5% of readability and the rest is up to the developer to factor smartly and name things well.
I used it as my primary language for several years and it's extremely capable and intuitive. The learning curve of it's syntax is really only slightly longer than any other language. And I have the very strong opinion that syntax contributes less than 5% of readability and the rest is up to the developer to factor smartly and name things well.