For a number of years the International Conference on Functional Programming has held an annual competition. In this competition teams are asked in a very short period of time to build a the best piece of software that they can under tight time deadlines. An example was this years task to build a program that would play a variant of cops and robbers.

Any team may use any language.

Most (all?) years, some teams attempt to use Perl for this. As far as I know, Perl has never managed to place in the top 3.

That strongly suggests to me that there are some kinds of tasks which Perl is not ideal for.

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