The same shortcut syntax that people complain about does make perl really handy for one-time tasks where you're iterating on ideas. Lots of features there that make that easy. One example:

  #!/usr/bin/perl
  while (<>) {
      # various processing here
  } 

That (<>) construct accepts data from stdin, redirection or file(s) named as arguments and iterates over the data. There's lots of things like that throughout the language.