I had hard time choosing between 5th and 6th, but even though it's been a large number of hours since I first tried writing perl (in 2002 when I switched from Windows (95) to Linux (Red Hat 7.1) I do think that 5th fits better to how I think of Perl - the number of hours is simply because there is *so much* you can learn but it pales in comparison to how little it took to achieve stuff much more complex in other languages which I had in total studied longer then than I have perl today.

I have learned only little more that I can achieve than I could with other languages back then, but there's a huge number of things I didn't think of being possible without complex hard work and a lot of code that I now can with perl - which also has, as side effect, taught me ways to less complex ways to achieve same with any language but that are still easyer in perl than in most others.

About the 6th - the word "investment" in my case wouldn't mean investment in monetary sense and I would like to see perl as in-demand language mostly because it would make many things easier for me personally (not the least being having to code with PHP simply because I wan't to use wordpress on my site and extend it's functionality - I didn't choose it for the language it was made with but the fact that what reasons I chose it for are more important than what I have to code in to extend it doesn't lessen the grief experienced when coding in PHP).