I remember reading the Perl O'Reilly book (Introduction to Perl[0]) end-to-end and basically feeling that it all makes sense - ($)calar, (@)rray and % for dictionary (because we have a pair of "o"s representing key/value) and so on. Coming from only writing bash (which is all people around me wrote), it was like a becoming a superhero overnight. I rewrote all my bash scripts in Perl and got high level language features with blazing speed. I relished taking people's bash scripts that took an hour and rewriting them in Perl for them to take barely few minutes (which was objectively terrible performance but I was a novice programmer then and nobody else knew better). I was a hotshot. It was an awesome feeling.
Later I got another role solely because they couldn't find Perl programmers and I wasn't half bad at it. But this was an actual application written by a bunch of people who wanted to write clever code and it was like handing over the keys to a missile depot to a bunch of arsonists. Many thousands LoC. By the end of it, I was told that we need to move to using Java and I could barely contain my relief.
For one-off scripts, still nothing flows like Perl. It is the most interesting language I have coded in, bar none.
[0] correction: Learning Perl, the llama book (thanks @ninkendo)
Later I got another role solely because they couldn't find Perl programmers and I wasn't half bad at it. But this was an actual application written by a bunch of people who wanted to write clever code and it was like handing over the keys to a missile depot to a bunch of arsonists. Many thousands LoC. By the end of it, I was told that we need to move to using Java and I could barely contain my relief.
For one-off scripts, still nothing flows like Perl. It is the most interesting language I have coded in, bar none.
[0] correction: Learning Perl, the llama book (thanks @ninkendo)