I'm learning perl right now and I'm bewildered at how could I overlook it for such a long time.
With all its quirks and strange design decisions (especially compared to elegant languages like ML or Scheme), it has it's own killer features I missed from other scripting languages so much, such as the ability to embed a shell command in backquotes and get its output easily.
Also the notion of context is pretty good, allowing to write a far shorter code, even sigils contribute to that naturally (in languages like bash they feel like a useless burden).
With all its quirks and strange design decisions (especially compared to elegant languages like ML or Scheme), it has it's own killer features I missed from other scripting languages so much, such as the ability to embed a shell command in backquotes and get its output easily.
Also the notion of context is pretty good, allowing to write a far shorter code, even sigils contribute to that naturally (in languages like bash they feel like a useless burden).