Thinking about this some more, I now feel really sad for anyone who doesn't use perl (i.e., almost everyone). Its immense power at the command line is something they'll never experience. Nothing today even comes close.

Even sadder that no-one will probably now start their programming career, as I did, with Perl as their first language. I feel honoured. At the time it was a toss-up between Java, which my house-mate was using every day to write banking apps at work, or Perl - that funky linguistic creation which granted you magical powers. No contest.