Why Perl & Mathmatica?
In the hierarchy of languages, Perl is a "high level" language,
optimized for easy coding of string searching & string manipulation.
It is well suited to web applications and is "open source"
(so that it is inexpensive and easily extended).
It has a very easy learning curve relative to C/C++
but is similar in a few way to C in syntax.
Mathematica is intrinsically stronger on math
(symbolic & numeric) & graphics.