I’ve started using Perl a couple of months ago and I’m quite impressed, specially with all the “bad” stuff I’ve heard about it.
It is incredibly flexible and productive and is very intentional in getting out of the way (what is it, Multiple Ways To Do Something?)
Hope you keep discovering all the wonderful things about Perl, and that you keep finding it useful and enjoyable. Perl is extremely powerful and comes handy in a lot of situations not only in text processing. Perl's bad reputation often comes from people who know very little about it.