I've taught myself Perl and do most of my current work in it. After reading Learning Perl and as many other tutorials and a plethora of O'Reilly books on Perl. I absolutely love writing Perl code and understand your feelings of missing coding Perl.

However, after I had finished reading a few of my books and had a few (small) coding projects under my belt I decided to teach myself Java. First because it's popular language emerging as a leader and I didn't want to be left out. Second I wanted to learn OO programming methods. This turned out to be a be plus for me. While I was studying Java I was constantly thinking about how to translate that to OO Perl. Consequently, my Perl skills improved while I was learning Java.

My feelings are never turn down any learning opportunities...espesically when someone else offers to foot the bill.

-hieronymus