Perl5+MooseX::Declare+lots of CPAN for general purpose programming (web apps, network daemons, automation code)
Old school scripting style Perl5 for when shell gets clumsy
Shell for simple scripting
C for bit twiddling either due to hardware level madness or for performance
whichever lisp REPL I have handy for reasoning about high level logic
I don't write GUI apps so I have absolutely no idea what I'd use for that if I did. Probably ObjC on OS X and Perl5 for cross platform (easier to learn Wxperl than to do without CPAN when I'm not aiming for mac-quality polish, I suspect, though that could easily be familiarity bias on my part).
And ... that doesn't really say what Perl5 is best for - it says what I choose to use it for - my general purpose mid range programming language in one configuration, and my primary scripting tool in another.
I actually quite like python (and I hear wonderful things about their wx libs so I'd definitely look before starting on a GUI app) but I like being able to extend my language up towards the problem lisp-style and it doesn't want to let me do that to the same extent as Perl5.
I don't mind ruby but their decision to inflict the single-inheritance smalltalk object model on me rather than the more flexible approached both Perl5 and python allow leads me to discount it for any project where I know I'm going to be heavily object oriented - if I wanted bondage and discipline in my OO I'd be looking at statically typed languages instead.
I'm not sure any of the above really answers your question, but hopefully it explains to you why I don't have a better answer at least :)
Perl5+MooseX::Declare+lots of CPAN for general purpose programming (web apps, network daemons, automation code)
Old school scripting style Perl5 for when shell gets clumsy
Shell for simple scripting
C for bit twiddling either due to hardware level madness or for performance
whichever lisp REPL I have handy for reasoning about high level logic
I don't write GUI apps so I have absolutely no idea what I'd use for that if I did. Probably ObjC on OS X and Perl5 for cross platform (easier to learn Wxperl than to do without CPAN when I'm not aiming for mac-quality polish, I suspect, though that could easily be familiarity bias on my part).
And ... that doesn't really say what Perl5 is best for - it says what I choose to use it for - my general purpose mid range programming language in one configuration, and my primary scripting tool in another.
I actually quite like python (and I hear wonderful things about their wx libs so I'd definitely look before starting on a GUI app) but I like being able to extend my language up towards the problem lisp-style and it doesn't want to let me do that to the same extent as Perl5.
I don't mind ruby but their decision to inflict the single-inheritance smalltalk object model on me rather than the more flexible approached both Perl5 and python allow leads me to discount it for any project where I know I'm going to be heavily object oriented - if I wanted bondage and discipline in my OO I'd be looking at statically typed languages instead.
I'm not sure any of the above really answers your question, but hopefully it explains to you why I don't have a better answer at least :)