I'd also been thorugh the Basic, C, assembler stages (started off as a hardware/systems guy, long time back).

If I'd known perl back in the early days, it would have made a lot of difference. Anyhow, I was making the slow transition from hardware to software and got to work with a guy who had used Perl to write scripts for processing boundary scan (BDSL) files and running some kind of home grown JTAG tester (this will be Greek to you unless you have a hardware background). Anyhow, I had to peer in those scripts and so got introduced. The guy was very smart, I got on with him, and he obviously dug the language, so that sparked my interest.

Didn't really get a chance to follow through until I found myself with some downtime, and got into CGI scripting. And then by chance, Perl came in very handy at my next job as a tool for writing C++ code generation scripts. It all just carried on from there.

I am quite curious about Python and Ruby too, will probably take a peek if the chance comes along. Perl is a wonderful language, but there are other good ones too. One day a project will come along that's already in one od those langs, and off we go again ... it's all good in my book ...