Let me generalize your statement: "If your system can be explored, it makes a special community".

It's not only the special cases, it's that Perl is like a castle that you can enter through the main entry; you can stay in the large audience room for years, or you can explore all the dark corners, "slay dragons and rescue maidens" (to paraphrase Abigail-II; no offense meant to our Breathers of Fire).

The multi-paradigm paradigm plays an important role here - you can write procedural, object-orientated, functional or declarative code (through regexes), and probably many other flavours, in just one language. Much space to explore. TIMTOWTDI.