Ahh perl... the first language I used to make something non-trivial. The coolest script I wrote was a load balancer that used ssh to submit jobs and monitor the activity of nodes in a cluster via commands remotely executed by ssh. No root access needed, no servers to install, just needed to have an account accessible via ssh on the remote machine and ssh + perl on the machine you were working on. It was the simplest solution to the complex problem of "I have all of these computers, now how do I use them to their maximum potential?" Stuff like Linda existed than, but I found it way too complex in comparison to my simple scripts. Alas, I since moved onto the heady world of lisp, but I still use perl for the occasional $ perl -pe 's/this/that/' at the command line and as a alternative to bash scripting.

A merry Tim Toady to you all! Also, an obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/224/