Web polls are a lousy way to obtain truth.

Poppycock! Clearly you fail to appreciate The Line of Truth ;^)

I would add to your list the observation that more than any other language I've ever worked with (okay, only C derivatives mostly) Perl allows the programmer to develop idioms of his/her own and to generate a set of (hopefully consistent) norms with which to write and evaluate code. To me, Perl is interesting because accomplishing a task isn't a matter of appeasing a compiler, but figuring what I want to say and how I want to say it. True, this is why people complain about Perl code being "write only", however I'm not inclined to fix the problem of unmaintainable code by forcing everyone to use an intentionally dumbed down language (<cough>Java</cough>).