Definitely. Perl changed my career. A few years ago I was a land surveyor and I started taking courses in C and C++ thinking it would be good to automate some of the tedious text file manipulation that my job required. I wrote a few programs in C and then I heard of a language called Perl that was supposed to be good for text manipulation. Picked up a $10 Perl book in the bargain bin at CompUSA and WOW! I was never a C guru but I could crank out programs so fast in Perl that I never looked back.

Writing Perl was so much fun that I thought 'hey, I could do this full time'. I started looking around and I was lucky enough to interview with a Perl fan who was willing to take a chance on someone without a CS degree and 10 years of Java experience :). Four and a half years later I'm still there... also through two rounds of layoffs. I believe my Perl skills (and the infrastructure I built with them) are a big part of the reason for that.

I often think about the difference that Perl has made in my life. I was familiar with C and C++, I now write a fair amount of Java, and I've dabbled with a few other languages. But none have impressed me the way Perl did.