Well said, sstevens. I describe Perl to the unenlightened as is the Swiss Army Knife of programming languages. I have yet to find anything it can't do.
I haven't tried Lisp. I can assure you that Perl beats the hell out of <show-age>Fortran and PL/I</show-age>. I also could not see what all the fuss is about with Ruby.
Java snobs always sniff about how superior their language is, and how "unmaintainable" Perl is. But I find Java inscrutable because of its atomistic style with all the teeny-tiny methods scattered all over the place. Anyway if I wanted that I could do it with OO Perl. Plus declaring EVERY SINGLE THING is just plain annoying. I can prototype code in Perl in a quarter of the time it takes in Java.
Viva la Perl! (Or is it el Perl?)