Perl
Perl is one of my favorite programming languages. It is a very versatile language, it's free software, and it's available in most platforms.
Perl is an interpreted language, but it's by no means slow. The syntax is similar to C with curly braces and all. Variables do not need to be declared, although this can be enforced by calling perl with the -w option. Further strictness can be ensured by starting your program with a use strict statement.
Two things makes Perl stand out:
- Regular Expressions (RE's) are built into the language. You can do so much with RE's, and I really miss the simplicity of using Perls RE's when programming in e.g. Java where RE support is much more cumbersome.
- The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN). Perl comes with a lot of modules as standard (like all the class libraries that comes with Java or C++). But there are times, when the standard modules are not enough. This is very CPAN fills a gap. It's a moderated archive of free modules for Perl. Some modules are actually part of the modules distributed with perl, but some are CPAN-only.