I do not enjoy Perl, but I have a positive opinion of it :) I launched my career in the late 90s as a Perl/XS/CGI (later mod_perl) developer and have many fond memories of it. I also have seen enough cases of Perl codebase deterioration to acquire significant distaste for it as far as enterprise projects are concerned. I enjoy using it for one-liners and small scripts here and there because it's VI-like in terms of being ubiquitous. I just don't programming Perl in teams larger than 1. Makes sense?

I haven't used Perl since writing CGI in the 90s, and I'm not a fan of the syntax among other things.

But I'm great with regular expressions. It seems like everyone around me swears regexes are an impossible black magic, and so they think that I'm some epic level wizard. And I have Perl to thank for that.

I'm a huge regex fan too. The main thing I love about Perl that is missing from most (all?) other languages is that regex is plain old syntax, not an object/function/module.

Javascript has adopted this, among other nice things it's gotten from Perl.