I'm a self taught programmer, having started with BASIC.

I learnt several different versions of BASIC on different machines, dabbled in Z80 assembler, before moving to Modular II on the Amiga.

It was my knowledge of programming the Amiga that got me my current job (knowing how to handle linked lists within linked lists within linked lists ...), using C (which I hadn't used before) as my primary language.

Several people here have written scripts in Perl in the past and then handed the jobs to me to maintain, which, of course, required me to learn Perl.

These days, my Perl programming is predominantly "quick and dirty" scripts that do a particular job. It just seems easier to do them Perl than anything else.

I haven't seen any jobs around here that require Perl knowledge exclusively, in fact, I haven't seen many jobs around here that require Perl (or C for that matter), most seem to require Java, .net, MySQL, etc.