For me the enthusiastic part is that it's the first language I used for a lot of stuff. My brain knows how to work with it. I know what I get. Perl is also a co

For me the enthusiastic part is that it's the first language I used for a lot of stuff. My brain knows how to work with it. I know what I get. Perl is also a constant, it doesn't change a lot and my scripts from almost two decades ago still work. Also, it's part of the basic install of any common Linux distribution. Dealing with a reference-counting GC is a bit of a nuisance when occasionally having to help it along manually, after getting used to a real GC, but it can also be beneficial: memory usage is deterministic and rather low. Perl is also slow handling data structures compared to languages like Java, Clojure or Haskell, unless you implement those / the bottlenecks in C, which functional-perl currently does not do. Perl is very hacky, in both the good and bad senses: it's not a simple and clean language or ecosystem (kind of the anti-thesis of Scheme), but it's also very malleable: core perl allows you to do a lot of things for which you would need macros or similar features (I still don't know how Ruby works in this regard) in other languages, and various approaches to extend it exist nowadays (e.g. you want something nicer than "sub { my ($x)=@_; ... }"? Today you can write a module that allows you to write "fun ($x) { ... }" pretty cleanly (also someone implemented[1] one for this example already)). Also, I've been positively surprised to find good hackers in the Perl community when I returned; perhaps that's correlated. [1] https://metacpan.org/pod/Function::Parameters https://metacpan.org/pod/Function::Parameters