No question, there. I started learning Perl to help a friend learn it. At the time, I didn't see any personal need for it.

Some time later, I decided I should devote myself to learning Perl because I needed a new language to study. I was working in technical support at the time.

A few months later, I was replacing ancient shell script testing tools for our ISP's Network Operations Center with Perl scripts. I was writing other 'helper' scripts internally.

I was hired away by an ideaLab! startup to work on a massive indexing and sorting project for MP3, using Perl. Great fun. Two months later they went under and my resume floated around a couple of weeks. Another ISP hired me to design those same tools I originally did in my spare time at the first ISP. This was my first really solid job.

I left to become a sysadmin for a research group. Recently, people realized when I said I knew Perl I wasn't kidding and now I have several major projects in the works, above and beyond my normal admin duties.

It is a year and half since Perl started making me popular. I agree 100%. All for the love of a Swiss army chainsaw.