missingthepoint,
I don't program professionally as my primary vocation and yet perl saves me time at work all the time. More often, it saves my cow orkers time. I will use this past Friday as an example.

There are scanned documents in image format sitting in a work queue table in the database. Each image needs to be opened by a human to read so a search can be performed to determine which record the document belongs to. This is a time consuming process.

I wrote code that uses OCR technology to convert the scanned document to text and then wrote an algorithm to match the document against records waiting for an attached document. Since OCR itself is not perfect, this process does not completely eliminate the need for a human. On the other hand, in roughly 2 hours I was able to reduce the human work by 60 to 70%. The reason why it only took a couple of hours is because 90% of the code was already written (CPAN). I just needed to tie it together.