Economics research. I had to learn Perl a few months ago to take over one of the prof's projects. Having had minimal past programming experience and just going through the Llama book, I now use it in many, many tasks since I basically sit around and manipulate data all day. Just recently I used perl to get all the public sex offender data in Pennsylvania. I then geocoded the addresses and assigned Census boundaries to each m*fer so we can see how their presence impacts housing choices and prices.