Wir hören von einer besondern Einrichtung bei der englischen Marine. Sämtliche Tauwerke der königlichen Flotte, vom stärksten bis zum schwächsten, sind dergestalt gesponnen, daß ein roter Faden durch das Ganze durchgeht, den man nicht herauswinden kann, ohne alles aufzulösen, und woran auch die kleinsten Stücke kenntlich sind, daß sie der Krone gehören.
Ebenso zieht sich durch Ottiliens Tagebuch ein Faden der Neigung und Anhänglichkeit, der alles verbindet und das Ganze bezeichnet.
----
There is, we are told, a curious contrivance in the service of the English marine.
The ropes in use in the royal navy, from the largest to the smallest, are so twisted that a red thread runs through them from end to end, which cannot be extracted without undoing the whole; and by which the smallest pieces may be recognized as belonging to the crown.
Similarly a thread of attachment and affection is woven into Ottilie’s diary which connects it all together, and characterizes the whole


Goethe, Elective Affinities, part two, chapter two

Dedicated to my 15th anniversary at perlmonks (Happy Monkday!!1! You've been here 15 distressing years. Has it really been that long?), but also to monks who forgot to celebrate their anniversary here; to all my firends at the monastery old and new ones!

Indeed 5 years (one lustro in eatalien, a word with no translation) are passed since Ten (years) Here. The fact you dont know is that i have spent 1/3 of my life lurking here; no regrets!

Sincerely perlmonks is still my only online community, as Perl is my only programing language: machines are invading our lives: Perl let me to exercitate my will against them. I know i loose a lot knowing only Perl and not many other interesting technologies, but I have also some real life to attend..

Can you guess what Perl level i reached after 15 years? I just completed the basics! It is true that ten years are the minimum to achieve a good degree at something. I needed even more because of my classical education and my partime employement (or maybe I'm a bit dumb as my TERM %ENV var.. ).

Infact I have a lot more to learn and to practice: module creation and testing being on top of the list. Not because I have something important to share in CPAN, but principally because abstracting behaviours to modules is the only easy way I found to test. And good tests are the headcorner stone of any solid building. Web developping with modern Perl tecniques follow very near in the list. Parallel programming and hardware interaction follow as well.

Perl help me a lot during my daily tasks. I'm a lazy (in a Perl sense..) sysadmin forced by the market to have $^O matching 2 ** 5 most of the times; I use Perl as soon as I can, many times in the darkness of my desktop, just showing results. I activate, fix, automate, report, communicate, summarize, show, backup, retrieve.. using Perl, peppering with some fun a (permit me to say) boring job.

Utterly astonished by the knoweledge and altruism of many monks here at the monastery I find everyday something interesting to learn or to bookmark in my cell for further investigation. Some good old monk is returned after years to perlmonks, for my joy, and some new, very skilled ones have joined recently. I've learn what to pick and what to discard and every progress I made in my Perl skill is due to this community.

Let me say that, as five years ago, I still own and ride my wonderful Kawasaki GPZ motorcycles, I still have the same wife (even if motorcycles are easier to handle). I plan to repaint both when I have some money to spend (motorcycles not wife!).

Using Perl to solve my dilemmas and to expand my action field let me feel the same thrill for the challenge as fifteen years ago. I have some math fascination (having no math background at all) for Tartaglia's (well Pascal's) triangle and for numeric series and some interest in photo manipulation with surprising (to me!) good results: I put them on github and I'll put some other decent old project and new things in the future.

Serving here at the monastery, helping when I can (and when powerful monks are distracted) is a pleasure and a privilege. Again everything I know in Perl, every progress I made is a gift from perlmonks and the Perl community in general. CPAN is a big sea full of treasures and syrens (even dangers for the unwares) and is worth the navigation: I see there many different way to approach problems, wrong and unmaintained attempts, state of the art by genial ones.

15th anniversary! I'm still a teenager in Perl programming. As every teenager I have dreams and some destructive luddite will as well: oneliners and evil evals comes from this part of my brains. But sometimes I gave some very wise answer as well. It happens.

At nigth sometimes I find myself lurking into longtime abandoned cells of monks of the past: you can find there funny nodes and precious insights. Byfar better than watching tv! Surprisingly most of such content is still modern and valuable even after many release of Perl. I suspect I started with 5.6 or 5.8 and I'm still alive during 5.26 days. Looking backward and forward too: (?<=pm) and (?=pm)

Time is money and this post is already too long, so just some final words:

Perl and Perlmonks forever!

Many thanks to perlmonks community for this fun and profiting time and take, as souvenir of the party, a little toy by my part!

L*