[pvaldes]

> if you are only working with strings ... that's hardly scientific computing

It depends on the field. RNA/DNA, Polypeptids and proteins are just long chains of text, therefore Perl can deal easily with the problems of finding things, manipulating them to build a new chain or translating the chain to a different format. This is a significant chunk of what Bioinformatics do all the time, and Bioperl can manage it.

Also a big part of astronomy is analyzing or finding stars in a tridimensional matrix of space. PDL can be useful with that. Is not dificult to extract a slice of interest in the space matrix and focus our research on it. The main problem could be the lack of experienced people available having exactly this problem to solve.

I don't know if original Perl is very good or bad for that, but there are several Math modules that could have what you want and be easily connected with the former stuff. In fact there are a lot of them to choose:

https://metacpan.org/search?q=Math

Raku at least has a Math::Model module to simulate Physics stuff. I ignore how developed is the module or how its perform would compare with Pyton's similar stuff