Personally, I'm not RE-claiming Perl, as I just started out using it. I'm rather CLAIMING it... and having a difficult time in doing so...

The company I work for is "not into open source stuff" as they call it themselves. Which in practice means that they do all the one-off jobs either by hand, either by $1000+++ solutions.

Well... it's their money and time, I suppose

So I started out using Perl myself for some of the jobs that come with the project I'm working on. (Sneaky uh?)
Naturally, I can't work on Perl all of the time, so advancing in Perl is a bit like advancing in a traffic jam for the moment: go...stop...go...stop...

Besides that, I started out re-writing a java html pre-processor I've been using for the last 2 years ... in my spare time of course.
This already has proven very helpfull in understanding the OO side of Perl.

It's just a matter of re-claiming your own time, in my opinion... hard enough in itself...

Cheers!
Michaeld.