All this progression rings true, but also the initial attraction of Perl. Back in the late '90s I used Perl at a job where everyone else worked in C. This was in the days that programmers of compiled languages were skeptical of interpreted languages. One day a friend invited me by where he worked, where the sysadmin was a "real computer guy". The sysadmin turned out to be a man with long hair and a long gray beard. He was using a very thin Sony laptop with Linux and a command-line TTY (he said he'd never bothered to install X-Windows) and after he deployed a new release of the company's code using a single command and started nmap running on the internal network (he wanted to see who else was running a Unix), he asked me what sort of programming I did. I was a bit cowed, and apologetically said that I didn't really program, I only did scripting in Perl. He looked at me in the eye for the first time and said, "Perl is most bodaciously a real programming language."

Seeing Perl 6 release notes like "Use of EVAL now requires a declaration of ‘use MONKEY-SEE-NO-EVAL’" and "Non-digit unicode characters with a numeric value (½ and such) can now be used for that numeric value" reminds me of the nerd coolness of Perl, so different from the straightforward sensible air of Python. I don't see many deep-hacker sysadmins these days, but I hope the excitement of Perl 6 can inspire some inefficiently marvelous coders...