[kbenson]

> You'd have to say first that Perl programmers tend to view generic programming problems (say, how to route email messages) as questions of text manipulation rather than other paradigms.

Which I think you could actually make a strong case for. It's very natural in Perl to reach for a regular expression instead of other tools, and to join data into and split data out of strings, since the core data types don't distinguish between numerical and string data, the operators do.