I certainly appreciate a lot of the features presented in the poll, but when I first encountered Perl (I believe it was close to 5.28), what really caught my attention were some features not listed here:

• Readily available in almost any *nix system (with consistent behaviour between them);
• Nice and pervasive documentation (very practical to query too);
• Great regard for backwards compatibility (if I write it today I'm confident it still works in ten years).

Still regarding documentation, I'd like to mention how POD is great when you'll document your own programs, and how perlintro quickly enabled me to accomplish the tasks I needed when I was getting to know Perl.

Also, I like its close relationship with UNIX and the inspiration taken from it. Makes Perl great for sysadmin tasks, which was (and to some degree still is) my focus when I decided to learn it.

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