Thank you all for your thoughtful responses! I really hope I did a good job conveying that I seriously did want feedback on this question, and my counter-arguments to Perl were simply to alert you to my biases going into the discussion.
Anyway, from these responses, I would say there is no compelling reason to learn Perl as a beginner or advanced-beginner, but perhaps for someone beyond that point there are some decent ones.
Anyway, from these responses, I would say there is no compelling reason to learn Perl as a beginner or advanced-beginner, but perhaps for someone beyond that point there are some decent ones.