Perl was originally developed as a language to displace awk and sed in Unix system administration.
It has since become the defacto language for Internet programming as well, and today it's hard to find a system the is not using Perl for one purpose or another.
Perl is a scripting language which means that it runs directly from the source code. There is no separate compilation process. But, it's not a strictly interpreted language either.
The program perl actually compiles much of the source code into an intermediate byte code which is then optimized before running. The effect is a language with many of the advantages of both interpreters and compilers.
With its flexible syntax and rich regular expressions, and full library of internal functions, Perl has allowed me to open up my creativity as a programmer. I hope it does the same for you.