You... bought a laptop just for an editor? :-)

Yep. I bought a $3500 laptop, so I could run a $70 piece of software (educational discount, the price has since gone up). I was doing Solaris sysadmin work, and I had Solaris and Windows (just for Visio/Excel/MSWord) on my desk. I'm more productive in BBEdit, which is Mac-only. Oddly enough, I never saw a single Sun Professional Services person running a sparc-based laptop, and they seemed about 50:50 Mac:Windows.

As much as I agree, I still think that this (my current job) is an excelent opportunity for me to excel in this particular tool (Perl).

I'm guessing that even though you're saying it's just for Perl, that there are other, less tangible things, that even if you can't easily put them into words. But that's not bad. Go with your gut instinct -- it's normally right. (okay, I admit, I spend way too much time reflecting on the past, doing the 'what-if' thing, but it's unhealthy to spend too much time dwelling on mistakes, once you've identified what the problem was, and how to identify it and avoid it in the future).

Likewise, even though I said 'personel problems', it was actually much more complicated than that, and there were many other contributing factors.

I would still advise against using one, and only one tool -- it's more important to do it because you're comfortable and happy using it, rather than just because it's Perl. Learn some other languages, too, as you'll find that there are some things that are easier to do in other languages, and it can help you think about your problems differently. Change is not necessarily bad, and if you fight it just for the sake of change, you'll have problems. There are valid times to fight change, but you have to access each instance individually.

Besides, if you know other languages, it helps you when you have to migrate other programs to Perl