Well, I can't speak of 'since the beginning', as I started with perl 5. The biggest change for me personally, has been not so much a change in perl itself, but CPAN, both as it has grown, and as I have grown, learning to use it. Every time I use a language other than perl, I come out dissapointed, not so much in the language itself, but because they don't have a CPAN equivalent.