Yes, Perl is fast, and that actually amazed me when I first started using Perl. That largely changed my view as what scripting language is, or to be more precise, whether Perl is still a traditional scripting language. After a while, when I realized Perl's extended coverage (thanks to Perl core modules, and mostly to CPAN.), I now no longer view Perl as (traditional) scripting language.

A major benefit I got from Perl is that, Perl actually allows me to spend more time thinking, instead of coding. I recently wrote in Perl, a tool that analyzes the performance of our system. It basically reads a log file (that has time stamps with log msgs), and do whole bunch of regexp. It worked great. It only cost me two hours and quickly pointed out the bottle neck of our system.

Late when someone asked why not using Java, and I told him if he could write it in Java within 10 times the size of my Perl code, I would use Java (10 times is probably a little bit ... but I don't think it is too wrong)