my farts are not quite as smelly as yours sundialsvc4 ;) however i also picked up perl some years ago as i discovered you could do lots of "whatever you need done" system administration tasks, data tranformation tasks, and CGI..can all be done in perl with minimum fuss. i'm not sure yet what to make of perl 6...as now it's back to declarative datatypes, and other syntatic sugar that makes it look like java with regard to OO. i'm sure it's all good when you need it..but i don't think you should be forced into it. looks a bit like bloat to me. anyway, whilst perl is not as popular as it used to be, it's still installed by default with the OS for the OS'es that count. So while some people can't adapt to any task and require Visual Studio and VB .net or C++, and a month to do any minor task....you can usually do it in perl in about 5 or 10 minutes.