Right on the money Blue. I've been (ab)using Perl for a very long time compared with most people here, and yet I've managed to touch only a small part of it. Even so, it has been a great replacement for the type of work I used to do in C and/or Fortran (and I made much use of Perl's portability, far more real than that of C or Fortran!). While Perl is wickedly powerful, it also makes complicated string manipulation very much easier than most other languages I've tried.

Now I'm still using Perl on a daily basis, but the stuff I write now is much cleaner and easier to debug, as well as likely faster to write and execute. I still keep my fingers off the big red buttons for the most part, but reading all I can here and experimenting has definitely improved my results.

Back to the point of this thread, I think Perl can be used by (and offers benefits to) anyone that could comprehend any other programming language, and the best part is you don't need to move to a grown-ups language when your interest exceeds its capabilities ;-). One doesn't need to be a soldier from Switzerland to make good use of a swiss army knife, especially when all one needs is the bottle opener (hmmm... that sounded much better in my head).