what perl taught me (in the early-mid-90s)

Perl was the first language I learned after the "C" that was taught in my Intro to Computer Science class (so probably my fourth language overall, after BASIC and Logo growing up.)

Compared to C of that era, it was like manna from heaven. Here's what it gave me that C lacked:

• Maps, or as Perl called them, Associative Arrays. Key/Value pairs are such an ENORMOUSLY powerful concept, and this was my first exposure to them.
• Regular Expressions - being able to match strings is also very powerful and fundamental
• Strings as first class entities - compared to C saying "you can make a string as an array of strings ending with a \0 character", this was great. In this way too, C was oddly inferior to the BASICs I grew up with.
• Duck-Typing. I'm not as sold on the importance of duck-typing as I used to be, but I liked it. I especially like Perl's habit of quiet context-based assumptions... assuming false-y or null things are zero if you're trying to do math, compared to Javascripts tendency to panic with "NaN" is more robust and less error-prone than some purists probably realize.
• Not having to micromanage memory. Man, was C annoying in this regard; having to carefully de-allocate every hunk of memory explicitly was a real pain. (In retrospect, Perl may have gotten away with this more because of its "script" feeling... in general things that do some work than quit can be more forgiving than long-running processes...

Such a breath of fresh air... and then when I learned I could rent cheap webspace that would let me run Perl and that CGI mapped fairly wonderfully to that Key/Value concept... the sky was the limit. I could do nearly anything the web could do.

I was shocked a decade later when a coworker pointed out that most of that stuff I loved about Perl was actually from its history as a glue language, wrapping C(!)-based Unix system calls.  That stunned me... I knew the wonky syntax came from Perl's history as a bit of a mongrel, but compared to other stuff (especially early PHP) it always felt very professional, you hardly ever saw the skeleton, and there wasn't much in it that was obviously for the convenience of the language implementer rather than the programmer. And all these new tricks felt like the very opposite of C...

These days, my Perl is decidedly rusty. PHP eventually matured and having all the stuff for webtasks baked into the language rather than the ugliness of CPAN module compiling was great. Also I'm worried I should have been learning Python, rather than blowing it off because the given task was easier in more familiar Perl. And I never did get my head wrapped around Perl's flavor of Object Oriented thinking. Still, I'll always be grateful to it for opening my eyes to new ways of thinking about programming, which is what the worthy languages and frameworks do.