I used Perl for my final year project too.. One of the reasons that you mentioned, that no one else had done Perl, was part of the reason, but only a very small part

I'd done work with Java, C, C++ and a few other languages before.. the difference that I discovered is that these languages are a lot more detail oriented than Perl is.. the classic onliner that is possible with Perl underscores this point.. I think I can concentrate on the job at hand, and not worry too much about writing reams of code to get to that point...

I know its a biased example, but a friend was doing a similar project in Java.. all his code was 42 kb.. mine was just 11 kb ;o)

Its also worth noting that average time to develop something in Perl is generally shorter than equivalent in C.. I know this is subjective, a good C programmer is going to be pretty quick to do something, but generally, time to develop almost anything is shorter in Perl..

and when compared to the monstrosity that is Swing, Tk rules in UI speed and memory usage , nuff said :o)

So, in short, speed of development, lots of reusable code, unlimited flexibility (I love regexps ;o), and the sheer coolness of doing something no one had done before (in my university, at least) were my reasons for using Perl..

A few more points to add, I was happy to get away from malloc, calloc and the tedium of tracking memory allocations.. I appreciated being able to switch near seamlessly between Linux and Windows, which were my development OS..but these were mentioned before too
HTH