Perl was the first programming language I worked with at a real, paying job. I don’t miss that job, but it did teach me a lot about how to deliver value quickly (Perl is still better at smashing 400 million lines of text than most other languages), and some of the impediments to that (Perl’s “write only” syntactic approach).

For all of Perl’s shortcomings, I’ve always felt that no other language came with Larry and Randall’s sense that programming was fun. The Perl folks always understood that our skills were rare, and the powers they conferred were inherently magic - even if a bit dorky.