While I voted for "it's very easy to pick up and start writing", there really is some "my employer told me to" mixed in there. Having not written any code since sophmore year of highschool, I found my self working with a bunch of perl scripts written by the engineers at my company (at the time I was doing data entry), and was faced with the descision between fix the broken and poorly written perl script, or go home without pay. From there is was a matted of time before I was writting my own perl scripts, and just a hop, skip, and a jump from becoming an engineer myself.