Perl FAQ 1.10

Most definitely. In fact, you should delete the binaries for sed, awk, cc, gcc, grep, rm, ls, cat... well, just delete your /bin directory.

But seriously, of course you shouldn't. As with any job, you should use the appropriate tool for the task at hand. Just because a hammer will put screws into a piece of board, you probably don't want to do that.

While it's true that the answer to the question ``Can I do (some arbitrary task) in Perl?'' is almost always ``yes'', that doesn't mean this is necessarily a good thing to do. For many people, Perl serves as a great replacement for shell programming. For a few people, it also serves as a replacement for most of what they'd do in C. But for some things, Perl just isn't the optimal choice.

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