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I am a young monk who knows few Perls. I've come to the monastery to learn the ancient tongue and carry on its legacy. As a child of the shell myself, I admire Perl for its scripting capabilities. As a student of programming, I like Perls philosophy of borrow from everything. I've always wanted a universal language. Write in any type of pseudo code and somehow have it all magically compile. Well that's probably impossible till they get that tower back together again. Till then we have perl. I like writing in Perl even though I'm more fluent in Python and Bash and could often use one of those to accomplish the same task. I don't have any concrete way to explain my intuitions or preferences about it. I just feel that certain times Perl is the best tool for the job. I also appreciate the great quantity of legacy code, that is still in production, written in Perl. I am also a fan of computer history and learning Perl has helped fill in certain gaps in the historical record for me. Likewise, I am a fan of computer security. Perl's role as the de facto backend language of the internet from the 90's into the 2000's, means that even today if you want to understand the security implications of legacy systems you should learn some Perl! I also believe Perl is not a dead language. It is still hugely capable. It makes for a great automation language. As an amateur programmer and computer hobbyist Perl is more than enough for my needs (parsing logs, sending e-mail, automating backups). Plus with the massive collection of cpan modules it feel like you could use Perl to do almost anything as long as its hooked up to a computer.