I was initiated to Perl by someone at university who was ecstatic at how quickly one could set up a server and a client using sockets. At the time I was quite happy with C and was willing to go the extra mile (literally a mile of extra code, in length), in order to work with sockets. What impressed me in Perl was the ease of string construction/manipulation and regex searching/replacing. It was also the first time I saw hashtables and that impressed me also (by that time though they were already offered by awk). It was a few years before the millenium. And at that time, I initiated someone else, he was after easy regex searching in text. For years in my CV I wrote that I prototype in Perl and then use C for production. I think I still stick to this, though nothing goes to production these days.