I've recently dived into Perl. Its most powerful feature, in my relatively short experience, is that it provides powerful semantics for everything - text manipu

I've recently dived into Perl. Its most powerful feature, in my relatively short experience, is that it provides powerful semantics for everything - text manipulation, symbol table manipulation at runtime, packages, etc - and it also just gives up and assumes it's on a Unix system (hence the power as a "glue" language). Additionally, you can define new subroutines at run-time and replace most any part of the language at a whim. It's fast, and there is a very sane and simple subset of the language that's very readable and easy. It is not, however, terribly sexy, and the cult of personality around Wall has turned off a few people I know. I am continually surprised at the simple solutions I can get out of Perl (and the complexity I am allowed to work with should I choose to).