I can't claim to know lots of programming languages, or that I am fluent in the ones I know (~5 or 6). But, I find perl has a certain ability to flow; it has a feel to it.

I've tried other scripting languages. Python doesn't have the expressibility and doesn't always seem consistently built. Ruby's nice, but doesn't have all the power. Lisp dialects can be useful, but I couldn't see myself writing a large application in one of them.

Compiled languages just aren't the same. I find that they too can lack expressibility. Not to mention some of the more low level things you can get tripped up in. And no eval?

I guess it's the fact that you can do pretty much anything in perl, even if you should't necessarily. It has advanced features that let you do cool stuff. Backtracking through the regex world, for example. Or maybe obfu's, like Camel Code.

Granted, perl has its quirks. Some things are unreasonably hard, but that's changing.

elusion : http://matt.diephouse.com