Amusing topic. It's been my observation that scripting languages tend to have "getting things done" their primary focus, rather than performance (C), esthetics (Pascal), safety (Java), etc. Sure, Perl programmers are interested in performance, etc., but normally we just want to get a job done quickly and easily. With the current speed of modern computers, performance isn't required very often. Esthetics are a simple matter of taste, and you'll get in endless debates in most languages on the "one true way" to [align braces|set tabstops|select indentation width|name variables|...]. Safety is important, but not at the cost of being in a straight-jacket.

Perl has many methods of I/O cooked in, with a few simple and extremely flexible data types. So when you want to get a job done, you can simply read the data, stuff it into a combination of hashes and arrays, and get down to it. Other languages I've worked in have all the control you need to create any abstract data structure you want, and a paucity of I/O capability. So when you try to get something done, you find yourself designing a data structure, and then have to figure out just how you're going to get your data into and out of them.

I've been programming in C for nearly 25 years, and when I first saw Perl, I put off learning it for two years because it looks like line noise and gibberish from a "clean syntax" point of view. Then I had to learn it for my job, and I found out how easy it was to get things done in it. Soon after that, I found CPAN and it made Perl even nicer to work with.

Now I'm to the point where whenever I have to do something, Perl is frequently my language of choice. Especially as I'm accumulating chunks of job-related code to make things even easier. I still think in C/C++, and pointers are natural to me. I haven't yet figured out a good mental model of Perl's operators yet, so I'm always referring to the various perl* documents to figure anything out. And I still frequently think perl looks like line noise. 8^) But I keep typing #!/usr/bin/perl -w in the first line of my editor whenever I'm trying to get somethind done fast. (Which, in my job, is all the da** time....)

--roboticus