Why Perl?

• Natural progression from one-liner with wget to 15kloc monstrosity.
• String and date/time manipulation
• HTML parsing and web page fetching
• Good, if slow, XML support. (See later)
• I and lots of other people know it (perhaps most important)
• Why not?

• Date::Manip is excellent
• LWP for fetching web pages, not external wget or curl
• Memoize is very useful especially if you write lots of pure functions
• XML::Simple is evil