For a while at least, Perl did find a home in Linguistics. While it was because of the excellent text parsing tools, it makes a strange kind of sense as well, since Perl was designed to be a bit more like a human language and I think Linguists appreciated that. But that's such a small field that the impact was negligible. Most of the modern Computational Linguistic work is done in Java and Python these days, but for a while, many people working in Linguistics came out of their undergrad with at least a passing familiarity with Perl.
For a briefer spell, I seem to remember Perl finding a home in bioinformatics for much of the same reasons. I have no idea what or if that field has moved on to.
For me personally, Perl was the ultimate hacker language when people needed to get shit done and that shit involved munging lots and lots of files in text. But I think these days the world has moved onto other things that Perl isn't any better suited for than some other language (which is then conversely better suited for a bunch of other stuff than Perl).
For a while at least, Perl did find a home in Linguistics. While it was because of the excellent text parsing tools, it makes a strange kind of sense as well, since Perl was designed to be a bit more like a human language and I think Linguists appreciated that. But that's such a small field that the impact was negligible. Most of the modern Computational Linguistic work is done in Java and Python these days, but for a while, many people working in Linguistics came out of their undergrad with at least a passing familiarity with Perl.
For a briefer spell, I seem to remember Perl finding a home in bioinformatics for much of the same reasons. I have no idea what or if that field has moved on to.
For me personally, Perl was the ultimate hacker language when people needed to get shit done and that shit involved munging lots and lots of files in text. But I think these days the world has moved onto other things that Perl isn't any better suited for than some other language (which is then conversely better suited for a bunch of other stuff than Perl).