Ralph is a pretty amazing guy, he's been turning out interesting CS stuff since (at least) the early 60s and will probably be around long after I'm gone. He was my grad school advisor about 12 years ago -- a nicer person would be hard to find.

FWIW, if you haven't messed with Snobol (or similarly Spitbol) or Icon, give them a look. Both have a lot of Perl roots in them. Snobol was munging strings back in a time when everything was Fortran and Cobol. Icon made it easy to create "generators" (similar to closures), and allowed the programmer to get into the guts of the pattern matching process.