Some things are just faster to develop in some languages because they have different baseline capabilities. Try parsing and processing a lot of text input in C versus the same task in Perl. Assuming similar competency in both languages (hell, you don't even have to be fully competent in Perl for this, just not a total novice) and the Perl solution will come out faster unless you've already spent a lot of time doing specifically text parsing and processing in C (which is not its primary use-case for many, if not most, day-to-day C programmers).