For me the intruiging nature of Perl is only equalled by lisp - So I'm suprised you mention it in a non-intruiging sense.

I guess it's just a case of each of us having different preferences.

The thing about Perl is that there are a wide range of doing things, and ditto with Lisp - once you get it. With Perl you can do things in one fashion, and then gradually improve to using better idioms and techniques, whereas I'd say that with Lisp there's an obviously correct way to do things and once you've got it you know it.

I had a real awakening once I realised that I understood how lisp worked, and how to do things in a lispy fashion - something that was wholey new to me.

I come from a z80 assembly background, via BASIC, C, C++, and Java. Each of those taught me something new. With C it was that pointers could be used to get low-level access so assembly language wasn't required. With C++ it was OO, and the fun of the STD::Strings. With Java I got more into OO.

From that point of view Perl is almost a step backwards, very procedural, and with so-so OO support - but I keep being drawn back to perl as it suits me, easy to get started working on a new problem for example.

Lisp is something I cannot often use for practical reasons but it's so .. me!

Actually, I do really like LISP a lot - I studied all of Steele's book and read a lot of the Reference Manual (hundreds of pages available online). But with Perl it is so easy to do fairly complex things (using available modules.) E.g., I wrote my own webmail and web news reader programs in about a day. Also, Perl has to be the ultimate in text searching and manipulation; in some sense that seems like one of the most important things that one can do - after all, most information that humans are concerned with can be expressed as text, and if one can deal with and manipulate that, what else is necessary?
Of course, all programming languages ultimately do the same things; only the style (and built-ins) differ.
chas