I must admit that I've not read carefully the other replies in this thread. However at a quick overview I'd say that I share most of the cmts that have been done.

One thing that it seems to me not to have been mentioned yet and that I like particularly in Perl is the pervasiveness of natural-languages like principles.

Of course there are also some typical Perlisms moderately to consistently deviating from said principles. But for some reason everything seems to fit quite fine as well, and indeed to me they look like being just as "natural". In fact I like the freedom and the flexibility I'm given, although I'm aware also of the potential risks in them.

All in all it's difficult to say exactly what you like in Perl, just as much as it's often difficult to describe exactly what you really like in anything or FWIW anyone you like.

I can only say that I've tried many (well, maybe a bunch of is more like it) different languages, but I could not get hooked with any of them. Instead I started using Perl because I had a few tasks to perform and I simply tried it, then I found it unvaluable to do more and more things, so that for some reason that I can hardly explain I couldn't help getting hooked with it.