I've had pretty much the same experience as you regarding Perl. I started with C in high school but never really got anywhere. Once I found Perl a few years later, I was finally able to do the things that I wanted to do in C. I stuck with it for several years and got quite good with it. Having this knowledge and experience made it MUCH easier to learn other languages and finally I was able grasp C/C++ (though, not as well as Perl though) and do some cool stuff. Like you, I feel that I owe...well, pretty much my whole programming career to Perl. Like you, I don't use it these days, but it's definitely the language I look upon most fondly.