I've been watching Larry Wall's Perl 6 talks off late, where he talks of designing Perl programming languages(1,2,3,4,5 and 6). He goes back to 1987 and talks about problems in 1987 about difficulties in sanely doing text processing then. He mentions the problems really were that if you wanted to do simple text processing work there was always awk/sed and other little unix utilities in form of a command line program using pipes. But any thing more than that and you really had to write program combining them in a language like C(The dominant language of the day;circa 1987).
I see the situation hasn't changed at all.
Almost anybody who doesn't use Perl, continues to bend <insert their favorite language here> in a way that badly implements what Perl was invented to do in 1987. Which is to really solve problems like these, in the most appropriately designed programming language for it.
Perl was designed to fit the niche between [c/python/java/<insert your language>] and [shell/unix text processing utils].
When you bend your language to fit that niche, like this tool does(This tool makes a good attempt at turning Python into a Perl like language). You make it largely look Perlish. This is dilemma languages trying to replace Perl must face, everytime you try to invent a language to replace Perl, you end up inventing a tool/language that largely looks and works like Perl(Read: Ruby/Perl 6). People who have learned Ruby after learning Perl know this fact, it really feels like you are just learning some more extra syntax above Perl.
Giving a powerful command line language is very difficult. Because by very definition you have to design a powerful syntax in the most terse ways ever. Where does that leave us? This in a C based syntax and what you get is Perl.
It will take a little while to understand that languages like Python and Ruby are not replacing Perl. That is for the same reasons why Perl even in CGI days never came to replace Php. Its just these languages and tools like Perl/awk/sed are designed to rule a very different niche.
When you begin to understand the design and niche they occupy you will suddenly discover that your 100 custom scripts and jar files you spend days writing do badly what was already solved in one constant design paradigm some 2-3 decades ago.
This is the reason why the grey beard unix guy smiles at you every time you show him your world changing script.