The right tools for the job

Reading through some of the most interesting papers at the upcoming SC06 show. Yes, we will be there wandering around. I read an interesting paper from the originators of mpiBLAST. They had a great quote about developing very high performance computing tools, specifically in terms of tying multiple other tools together. They used Perl to do this. For good reason. Here is the quote:

I am not trying to denigrate C/C++. We find that when we need to stitch complex interacting programs together that using Perl, and Perl based frameworks such as Catalyst for MVC applications, makes development easy and supportable, while allowing us to leverage the awesome power of CPAN.