I was assigned to write a program(any language) which would login into a particular email service accounts (of course the correct username and password would be given :-) ) and check the user profile settings, inbox etc. I was given two days to decide what and how to use. Analysing the requirments I knew the language of choice had to:
1) have good support of regular expressions to scrap data from html pages
2) have support and added features for making https requests
3) have good support on the internet as I would be new to the language.
Within a day I had zeroed down to Perl which had all of these and the next day I became a member of Perl Monks. :-)