I dont think perl itself has helped my career. I have rapidly learnet perl and churned out countless applications, one off's and stop-gaps, which, without perl would not have been as easy given the context. All of which helps, but I wouldnt consider it the primary "helper".

I would say the things i've learnt from perl, primarily design philosophy and implementation, as well as communication of these ideas, have helped quite a bit more. For example, I had a task to automate a business process. The original implementation was unscalable, and unsupportable, and after a couple of hours of careful thinking, a solution was bourne that would allow arbitrary business flows to be automated to an arbitrary level of complexity.

The lessons learnt along this path mean i can mentor others in my team and help them grow, hopefully one day into my position, where hopefully i'll be moving to the next level.