I am a biophysicist and use Perl primarily for scientific computing. Some say that Perl is a poor match to numerical work, but I would strongly disagree. Perl excels at data munging and database operations needed for large/complex experiments. Developing code in perl is much faster than doing so in C/C++, and the time saved usually more than offsets run time. If I have a hairy matrix calculation, then PDL is a good answer.