Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It's a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once you learned the language, it's more expressive.

Don't wear rollerskates to a tug-of-war.

Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.

It should be illegal to yell 'Y2K' in a crowded economy.

It's appositival, if it's there. And it doesn't have to be there. And it's really obvious that it's there when it's there.

[Perl] gives you the STDERR filehandle so that your program can make snide comments off to the side while it transforms (or attempts to transform) your input into your output.

I'm not too concerned about the future of Perl after me, because I see how these people are interacting with each other and even when I'm not there, they are helping each other and solving each other's problems in a way that I could not do, even if I were there.