[bavcyc]

As gtani said google the hooks into other programs. Also think about presenting your data in gnuplot, if you are writing the programs to crunch the data.

Perl is a fun language especially for text processing. As long as you have the memory and processor, Perl should work.

Is it the best choice? Depends on the person and how they program along with what preferences they have. If you have the algorithms in your head already, play around and put them into several different languages until you find the language that works best for you.

[hapless]

Bavcyc hit the core of this problem: The central item is YOU.

Are you, the programmer, familiar with perl? That's the question that really matters.