As for Perl's strengths, I don't think any other language comes close to the beauty of its regex engine. Other scripting languages do have regex facilities, but to the extent that they force regex operations into an OO framework (as Java and Python do), they kill the simplicity and, I would say, a fair bit of the power that Perl offers for doing a wide range of text-stream filtering tasks with very little coding effort (and very good runtime performance).

Add the integration of Unicode into Perl's regexes, along with the far-reaching Encode module for moving data into and out of other character sets, and you have a world-class God-send for people who deal with non-ASCII text data.

Then of course, there is CPAN. Nothing tops that.

As a more speculative notion, I haven't looked for or watched anything matching PerlMonks for the other languages -- I know (or assume) such sites are out there somewhere for Java, Python, etc. But I wonder whether they match the volume and effectiveness of our own Monastery. My (totally uninformed) opinion is this: when you get to be good with Perl, you get your work done so quickly, and the tool is so intriguing and multi-faceted, that (a) you have lots of time left over to help other people use the language, and (b) you have a strange compulsion to try it out on everyone else's problems -- it's such a great hammer that everything looks like some sort of nail...