A very interesting link indeed! While Perl might not look to good in many individual tests, the scorecard page on that site allows assignment of weights to the benchmarks and under the default weights Perl does fairly well (I'll have to go back when I have more active brain cells and refine the weights a bit).

Now that other languages have been raised in this thread, I'd like to add the point that (for me at least) one major benefit of Perl is greatly reduced development time - in the dark ages I did all my text processing in Fortran or C (funny, they don't include Fortran on that site ;-). Now I imagine this would be very hard to do, but has anyone ever attempted to compare the development times? Sure it would be hard to avoid just comparing the coding proficiency of people, and stats on LoC per day I've seen have usually been pretty indefensible. How about errors per day? Errors per line? Define a line or error! One might get around all these silly measures by simply comparing total time to meet an end-product specification, especially since many fields use (or are moving to) an end-product focus. Of course that ignores maintainability...

All the same, I imagine someone (in some hairy-titled ACM journal perhaps) has looked at this question, and since it's an issue that Perl responds to well, it might be worth further investigation, vis-a-vis Perl advocacy.

In any case, while I do find Perl vs. Perl benchmarks most amusing, all a benchmark will tell you is how fast a given platform can run the benchmark!

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

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