But it was a programming assignment. Building a thing fast is, outside of very few situations, not a thing to optimize for. Building something to be maintained and evolved over time by non rockstars is far far more important, IMO. Perl is great for ripping through some script quickly but it has problems for long term maintenance.
Though the interesting point here was that it made it easy to write the program fast the second time. While it should be very rare you need to write exactly the same program a second time, and can be a useful thing (albeit a hard thing) to optimize a language for if in writing a program a first time in that language you wind up with such a clarity on the problems you encountered that "solving" them again a second time feels trivial.
