Growing up I was always told if you want to be a great lawyer or medical doctor, learn Latin and Greek - if for no other reason it sharpens the saw and keeps your edge honed. Perl not only serves a similar purpose, but you'll end up learning a lot about *nix: file systems, shell scripting, networking, process management, etc. Most of all it will get out of your way and let you do what you really need to do. I don't know of any other programming language that provides this to the dedicated student. And if you know Perl, you can learn PythonJavaScriptPHPetc in a matter of minutes. I can't say it works the other way.