[mst]

Very very handy for people just learning (what's often referred to as "baby perl" in an affectionate rather than derogatory way).

Learning to use perl -properly- is a whole other barrel of monkeys though.

(it does have the advantage that it's very easy to spot code written by a confused perl programmer, whereas I've experienced a number of unfortunate events where python code initially looked fine but turn out to be logically utterly confused; this is not a complaint about python, though it does darkly amuse me)