I guess I fall in the middle, sort of. I got into the Unix/Linux world after spending 25 years in IBM mainframes. I encountered Perl and realized that the language was designed by Programmers for Programmers, to make Programming easier.

After a few months of reading and writing a few small scripts (20 - 100 lines, including comments), I came to the conclusion that Perl probably should be my language of choice when confronted with a New Problem, with excursions into Shell or Java (and now C), only when I am forced to. (When 90% of the New Problem is already available as Java classes, it does not really make a huge amount of sense to re-code. Just write the additional class to glue everything together and get out.)

Now my first thought when Management drops a New Problem in my lap is "I wonder what's on CPAN that addresses this...", and I am off. The ability to get a quick'n'dirty mock up of what they want seems to really impress the Management. And the fact that I can flesh out the demo/skeleton into a real application so quickly is a real plus.

Perl lets me do what I want to, with out getting in the way. (You might consider Perl the 'Learned Hand' of program languages -- it tells you how to do what you want to do.)

OGB