My brother is a Unix sysadmin and support guy, and he told me that I'd probably enjoy Perl. This was probably back in about 1999. I read the Camel, but didn't do much with it. I'd used regexes in a rather good programmer's editor, so it wasn't that mind-blowing at the time.

I re-discovered Perl by being given a large (4000+ installation, for a major auto manufacturer) Windows SQL database application to support. It had originally been written to run on Unix, then ported to Windows, and a lot of the support scripts were written in Perl. I wrote a couple of new ones, and was surprised at how easy and robust it was.

Since then I've been using Perl as a tool language while doing my main work in other languages. I've made colossal time savings by writing scripts for my colleagues to use that make the job easier.