math, I will say this. Programming is an Art Form, IMHO. And when you are trying to make a sloppy picture, that looks great but isn't the best drawn thing in the world, you look for perl.

When you are making that masterpiece picture that you want everyone to see, and you want everyone to look at and say what a marvel. You use C.

Now I will say this much, even simple things in C, take forever to do. I once was working on a port scanner in C, I think I was up to about 500+ lines of code.

Now that same thing in Perl, I can do under about 200. Depending on how much I want to add.

If you are going to be quick and dirty, use perl. If you want that masterpiece, that everyone believes was touched by good, use C or C++.

Oh and as a side note, when a language was made does not have anything to do with how good it will be, or how good it will be for a task.

C is probably one of the most used languages ever written. (Probably fighting with BASIC) But nonetheless, it is a great language, many things are written in it, the *nix kernel is written in it. (Though there is a Linux distro were the kernel is written in perl.)

The windows kernel is written in it.