when it comes to banging shit out, when you need more juice than bash, perl was capable of some crazy shit. I found it really frustrating trying to learn real programming because I was taught perl extremely thoroughly and for most other languages programming exercises you have to get 3/4ths of the way through the book before you're beyomd what perl can do in a couple of lines.

I eventually learned proper oo programming and compiler languages but there were a few years in the late 90's and the CGI-BIN days where a solid grasp of perl made you feel like a real hacker-ma'am.

As an example I give you the 'flip flop operator', (no idea if perl was the first language to incorporate this, but i saw it there first) which would allow you to parse any data stream, and execute a code block on every line in the data stream between two matching regexes. Absolutely invaluable for screen scraping and would let you hit a URL and extract just the data you needed with about 4 lines of code total, including the library call for the get!