A lot of my time in C was spent on memory management - when I switched to Perl it all went away. (I had some libraries I'd written to take care of it by then, of course, but in Perl I just didn't have to worry about cleaning up at all!) Oh - and strings! (But that's also a memory management question.) And regexp.
CPAN grew on me later - roughly as CPAN was growing. It was garbage collection that was my deciding factor.
