It seems to me that you're making the same sort of discoveries that I did some 14 years ago when I attended a presentation on perl by Rob Kolstad at the Software Development '90 conference in Oakland. As a C programmer having to write shell scripts this really blew me away, and the potential use that I could see for interacting with the databases that I was starting to use at the time was huge (cue "so I wrote sybperl" comment :-)

I've never looked back... :-)

Michael