i'll defer to alan perlis on this: "a language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing." does perl offer something distin

i'll defer to alan perlis on this: "a language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing." does perl offer something distinctly different from other, younger languages? IMHO, not really. there is a bunch of perl code out there that needs maintenance, which is why i learned just enough perl to read it. but who truly gets into programming to maintain something that's already built? might as well learn COBOL if that's how you think.