Actually, Perl was a quite natural choice for a while for some computational biology / bioinformatics workloads. In particular, defining scripts where you expect a sequence (like DNA) as input and a filtered or modified sequence as output allowed for processing pipelines that just flowed nicely: script1 | script2 | final_script.
It's been a while since I was in that field, but I suspect those kind of low level operations are now heavily optimized in faster languages as sequences to operate on became longer and operations more complex.
It's been a while since I was in that field, but I suspect those kind of low level operations are now heavily optimized in faster languages as sequences to operate on became longer and operations more complex.