I never took Perl seriously as a language and always thought it was just another tool like awk and sed. About 3 years ago a friend told me that he was running his entire company based on software written in a language called 'Perl'.
"Programming language?" I thought, "C is a programming language"
Anyway 3 years later I am addicted. It's the first language I look at for anything thats not realtime, safety critical, or numerical signal processing. Best of all I think it's the first General Purpose programming language. Secondly I think increasing cycle power has obviated the need for compiled speed in all but a few areas. It's a borg like language too because it assimilates the best of everything around it.