[Aereshaa]

@^: If you're on a *n?x (unix, linux, etc.) machine, Perl is great for glue programs, string handling, regexes. Its syntax is easy, and it is a interpreted language, so you can write programs and run them really easily. It has great integration with the shell, and has full support for unicode. It... Oh I could go on and on. It's a really fun language, and it's permissive syntax lets you write code the way you want to. It is also a good entry to the 'hard' languages like C. As I said before, I used Perl before C, and bash before Perl.

If you're not on a *n?x, then it's still very useful, and most programs in Perl that don't use the shell can be run on practically any platform without any changes!