Only that unlike COBOL, or VB, or the likes, it doesn't use English-like keywords thinking it will make the language "easier to read", but use concepts that are used in spoken language. This way, when you speak fluent Perl, you can express yourself better, and not just "do more".

I wish I'd said that.

No. Ireally mean it! I really wish that I had had the language skills or insight to have constructed those two sentences.

It bugs me intensely when I see the posts around here that condemn, eschew, and deprecate the power of Perl's notation in favour of some hamstrung subset of lowest denominator commonality or CS-theoretically correct formality.

For all the hype about CPAN, this is Perl's strength. So much of CPAN wastes space, time and cycles re-implementing Perl's built-in power, to 'correct' its non-orthogonality, or to 'make it OO-compliant'. And in the process, completely miss the reasons that make Perl uniquely powerful for expressing solutions to complex problems in productively concise and intuatively simple terms.

Java and its libraries are extremely complete and powerful. Java's problem is that it takes so long to express the high level concepts that denote the algorithm you are trying to code, that you loose your way in all the low-level detail that it forces you to state explicitely and verbosely

The beauty of Perl is that it allows you to say: "He'll process all the data", not "My assistant, John, 34, from Popocatepetl, married with 3 children, will go through all the data, starting from record one, and working his (John's) way through sequentially, record by record, until he has processed all the records!".