Perl's way of creating and using data structures is one of my most favorite features. Once you learn the basics or arrays, hashes, and references, you can string them together to make any arbitrarily deep structure using very terse syntax. Writing in Java for school projects over the last 2 years, I spent most of my time reading through documentation about the myriad collection classes, some new and some leftover from older API revisions, catching exceptions that I knew would never get thrown anyway, and figuring out how many sets of parentheses I neede to use to typecast the result of a method call, instead of doing actual work. Perl usually stays out of your way and lets you concentrate more on important work rather than little technicalities. That also means that it can take a long time to learn how to do it right, and if you don't know what you're doing Perl will easily break and give you lots of weird errors (although I have to say C++ takes the cryptic-error cake). However, now that I've gotten to know Perl, as well as several other languages, Perl code is definitely quicker to write than anything else.