When I was a CS student in university, I did a lot of programming to fulfill assignments. Of course, these had to use a particular language, a particular style or component or methodology; after all, the assignment is intended to develop understanding of some concept, and to test the student's ability and dedication.

But there were also many programs or program bits which I wrote to determine something for myself. In particular, I remember writing a program to determine the frequency distribution of files of various sizes. I used 'find' to explore the file system and extract the size. In further processing I categorized the size logarithmically: 0, 2^0, 2^1, 2^2, 2^3.... It was 15 years ago, so I don't remember the details exactly, but I definitely verified that well over half all files are under one 4K block .... in fact I believe at least half are under 1K. It would be interesting to repeat this experiment now that I work for a mega-corp, with access to terabytes, maybe even petabytes, of storage. After all, my personal computer has more hard drive than that CS department computer did then.

Whether it's to explore an idea you have, to verify some claim from class, or to implement free study/honours projects, there are many situations where you are free to use the language of your choice. Use Perl to implement simple programs, and gradually you will become more confident in using it.

That's my advice.