xkcd - Lisp

Always trust God to tell it like it is.

Personally, I haven't found a language I like better than Perl 5. This hasn't stopped me from trying. Perl 6, Python, C, C#, Visual Basic, and Ruby have all been potentials over the years, but none of them have really compared to the ease of use of Perl.

Ease of use? Yeah, you heard me. Perl is easy to use because it was designed for the practical system administrator. Sysadmins don't care how object-oriented your language is, or how elegant your anonymous accumulator function definitions are. They are people who have a project to finish and a problem that needs to be solved, and so-help-me your language had better be able to go from zero to sixty in less time than it takes to learn how to write a class deconstructor that in the eye of everyone but the language's author should already be part of the interpreter. Perl is fast, Perl is easy, and Perl has a consistent syntax and no duck typing. Hallelujah.

Postscript: It should come as no surprise that a lot of the programming projects I undertake make extensive use of strings and string-modification operations, which Perl excels at performing. If I were doing, for example, a primarily network- or file-intensive project, Perl might be as painful as others. We shall see.