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Perl is a language for getting your job done
Of course, if your job is programming, you can get your job done with any "complete" computer language, theoretically speaking. But we know from experience that computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy. At one extreme, the so-called "fourth generation" languages" make it easy to do some things, but nearly impossible to do other things. At the other extreme, certain well-known, "industrial-strength" languages make it equally difficult to do almost anything.
Perl is different. In a nutshell, Perl is designed to make the easy jobs easy, without making the hard jobs impossible.
- Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen & Randal L. Schwartz
in the preface to Programming Perl
I first started using Perl (specifically, Perl 4.18 as MacPerl) in 1995. I was given a large data filtering and analysis problem to solve: take a big pile of data, squeeze out the useful parts, and perform some simple statistical analysis. The data was in MS Excel spreadsheet format for a Macintosh.
I could have pulled the data out manually (once a week; I think not...). I could have shoved the data over to the local Unix system and written some scripts to handle it (too much work). I could have learned Excel's macro language and done everything in spreadsheets (no; been there, done that, did not enjoy the trip). Perl was the only sensible choice. So I loaded up MacPerl and started coding.
By the time I was done my script was 1000 lines long (and over the 32K TextEdit limit). I could add new statistics at a moment's notice. I had upgraded the script to be usable by more than just myself (and it was in use by several members of my department and other departments). And I was thoroughly hooked on Perl (and MacPerl).
I've been a professional programmer since 1984, and I've worked with the Mac since 1986, and but until MacPerl I had never before programmed my Mac. Now, with MacPerl, I can do nearly everything I would be able to do on my Unix system (and I have contextual syntax coloring in my text editor :-)