While I'm not a fan of Perl per se, I find it fascinating. One of the reasons for that is that its creator, Larry Wall, is a linguist by trade. This shows in a lot of ways, for example by the fact that, like natural languages, Perl has context: A variable can behave differently whether it is used in a scalar context or an array context. At the same time stuff like this is responsible for Perl's reputation as a write-only language, a cliche which has at least some merit to it.

I can highly recommend reading at least the first chapter of Programming Perl, it's highly insightful even if you don't plan to write or read any Perl.