A lot of people from "standard backgrounds" have the theoretical linguistics approach baked in to their literacy. Perl on the other hand has a much easier time adapting to varying thinking styles. Here's a comment I made about a former colleague's code earlier today:

> one thing people like about perl is it can shoehorn into pretty much any mental model. [ colleague ]'s model is quite solid but also pretty mental

There's something to be said for enforcing a certain kind of mental model. Java and C# do a terrible job of this. Python does a reasonable job. Ruby is just perl done differently - seems to make the "mental" part a bit easier. Personally aside from perl the programming I've most enjoyed is arduino flavoured C, but that's just for fun. I do perl for fun and profit.