I don't really see the option that I would pick: It was a good tool for a task I needed to accomplish.

When cell phones first gained the capability to receive text "pages", back when you had to actually use software specific to a particular carrier to dial into their system to send the text page, I thought it would be cool to set up an Internet based paging gateway. The gateway would dial into the cell service's paging system and send a text message. Later I tied it into a procmail filter so that my cell phone would receive the subject line and limited 'from' information on any email message where priority was set to high and the sender was in my 'accept' list. This was back in about 1996 or 1997, during the days of the Motorola Flip phones, and the Nokia 2160 (if memory serves). I got a lot of help on the project from my really great ISP. Perl was brand new to me, and without the ISP's guidance I wouldn't have had the skillset necessary. As a matter of fact, they ran the gateway on their server and used the same phone line that they had previously dedicated to only a fax server.

The fun lasted for about a year, until the cell company improved accessibility to their paging system by assigning a real email address to any cell phone capable of displaying text messages. Later true SMS was rolled out by my cell provider, and the whole thing became obsolete. But it was kind of a cool toy while it lasted.

Then other hobbies took me away from Perl for a few years, and then finally I re-learned (in much more depth) with the help of a lot of books and the PerlMonks website, beginning in around 2002.

So I guess in my case a pet project was implemented in Perl. I chose Perl based both on recommendations as well as things I had read about it online. Later, after some time away, I came back to Perl because I remembered how intreguing it had been during the first, brief, go-around.