I first became interested in Perl because of rn and patch already being firmly in my toolkit, alongside sed and awk. And then, this guy who had written a 25-page manpage (for rn) creates a little 5-page manpage for Perl 1.0, and yet it can do everything awk and sed can do!

So, I started with Perl because (a) of the guy who wrote it and (b) it made my awk/sed/shell monstrosities manageable.