I think you would really have needed to learn Perl in the 1990's.
Perl had three huge advantages (at least for me) when I first used it in 1992: 1: familiar syntax which paralleled well-loved tools (sed, troff, grep) 2: associative arrays as a built-in 3: regular expressions as a top-level language feature (not buried in some library with clunky syntax). A few years later, CPAN was another huge advantage.
Nowadays, syntax compatibility with sed is a disadvantage not advantage, associative arrays/dictionaries exist or are easily available for basically every language, and CPAN was the model that everybody else copied or did better. So really the "regexp syntax is immediately available" is the only remaining advantage, and it's rare that it would be worth it.
Perl had three huge advantages (at least for me) when I first used it in 1992: 1: familiar syntax which paralleled well-loved tools (sed, troff, grep) 2: associative arrays as a built-in 3: regular expressions as a top-level language feature (not buried in some library with clunky syntax). A few years later, CPAN was another huge advantage.
Nowadays, syntax compatibility with sed is a disadvantage not advantage, associative arrays/dictionaries exist or are easily available for basically every language, and CPAN was the model that everybody else copied or did better. So really the "regexp syntax is immediately available" is the only remaining advantage, and it's rare that it would be worth it.