> The strlen($String) function will take a LONG time to complete, because the result is characters, not bytes, and the framework has to count chars from the beginning to see how many there are, and of course this isn't the bytes of storage you need to allocate on disk. That's not true in Perl, because Perl stores characters not as a simple array of bytes (as C would) but an array of *codepoints*. Perl's unicode support is very very good. I don't know why slashdot does what it does.

Perhaps you were not aware that it's possible to compile Perl into a binary executable.

classic "I don't see how it's relevant to me so it can't be relevant to anyone else". Huge parts of the internet still run on Perl. booking.com is entirely Perl. Do you use git? then you use Perl.