I've used Perl in all of the many jobs I've had since 1996, although the only programming job I had in those 7 years lasted for a mere 10 weeks. In all other cases, I used Perl to write tools to make my (work) life easier. This varied from one-liners to move around some files, to a project that modified/created about 500 files containing SQL statements, generating over 75,000 lines of SQL code. Most of the Perl I've written, and most of what I write nowadays could be considered "systems coding". If I wouldn't have had Perl, most of my code would be in sh and AWK. I'd also say that most of my programs are less than 100 lines, and using more than 200 is rare. Most of my programs do just one thing, and are specifically written to do that thing. A large fraction, probably more than half of the programs I write, run only once (not counting test runs), and are discarded afterwards.

And I can say the same about what I do with Perl at home. Except that at home, I also write Perl code just to experiment, or to do fun and exciting things, like creating whacky regexes and JAPHs.

Abigail

To take your question in steps: I use a combination of perl, html tinkering, and javascript for web-development. Use a combination of perl and korn shell for must Linux applications. I'd like to be able to write perl executables and GUI applications, I'm learning Tk at the moment, but for now that's in the relm of java and VB. My favorite use for perl is to make my own computer run better and to tackle little ideas and problems I have.

Why: I started using perl for webpage design because that's what the scripts I would be working on were written in - I continue to use it for it adaptablity (esp. used with CGI and HTML::Template). When I write scripts for Linux, they need to be able to easily pass and obtain data from the OS and other scripts, which many times are not written in perl, perl offers the best and quickest way for me to do this. I have little control over what I write my executables and GUI in, so even after learning Tk well enough to use it, it will be a while before I use it at work.

I consider myself a computer user who programs to get a job done, and not a programmer. You are very limited as a computer user if you don't program.

I wanted to write a 21st century Family Photo/History Book, a sequel to a Family Book written in 1917. I didn't even consider a paper version. Paper books are static, and it is unclear if paper books will even be popular in 100 years, or if they will be something people collect like stamps? So, a "Living Book", in an electronic format seemed the way to go.

I chose Perl because I was told it could be done in Perl. Perl is difficult for a non programmer to learn, but makes life very easy after you start thinking in Perl. Initially I tried Tk and HTML for the UI, the results were ok but not really acceptable. I migrated to Flash for the User Interface, which I suppose is a seperate language, but I just view it as an exotic file format managed by Perl.

Perl seems to have been a very fortunate first choice. It is amazing how much you can accomplish without understanding the details of how a computer works. Although I view the Flash Player as a transitory technology, I am hopeful Perl will be like Fortran or Cobol, supported long after it has passed its prime.

Mindless plug from a non pro programmer, OReilly Books are like Lessons from the Gods!!!

Yes, Perl is fast, and that actually amazed me when I first started using Perl. That largely changed my view as what scripting language is, or to be more precise, whether Perl is still a traditional scripting language. After a while, when I realized Perl's extended coverage (thanks to Perl core modules, and mostly to CPAN.), I now no longer view Perl as (traditional) scripting language.

A major benefit I got from Perl is that, Perl actually allows me to spend more time thinking, instead of coding. I recently wrote in Perl, a tool that analyzes the performance of our system. It basically reads a log file (that has time stamps with log msgs), and do whole bunch of regexp. It worked great. It only cost me two hours and quickly pointed out the bottle neck of our system.

Late when someone asked why not using Java, and I told him if he could write it in Java within 10 times the size of my Perl code, I would use Java (10 times is probably a little bit ... but I don't think it is too wrong)

I guess I fall into the first category - those who use Perl for most things. While not 100% of my coding is in Perl, Perl is usually my first choice language.

What my Perl does at work:

• Send email (I built an email engine for our outbound marketing email with a rough speed of 40-50,000 personalized emails/hour. The average size list that's sent right now is anywhere from 100,000 - 450,000 addresses.
• Build lists of email addresses for mailings from our customer database. I have a number of list building scripts that do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to building outbound email lists:
  * build lists based on SQL query
  * build a list of x random users based on a SQL query
  * create an A/B split of a list
  * split one list based on another
• Create XML feeds for partners
• Handle incoming data feeds
• Provide web-based self service tools for other departments

I'm sure there are other scripts I've missed but these are the ones I work with the most.

Oren

Did you really want to admit to being a spammer in public?

UPDATE: It is possible that I am being premature. Certainly there are many legitimate reasons to send lots of email, and I have done so myself.

However my presumption definitely was that someone whose job entails little but sending impressive amounts of "personalized bulk mail" is likely to be engaging in spam. As a project or three among many others, that makes sense. But little but?

I wonder what other people's experience is?

Did you really want to admit to being a spammer in public?

I think that applying the "spammer" label is a bit premature. There are plenty of business that have large customer bases that they contact via email. Somebody needs to turn the crank. A friend has a completely legitimate job that sounds very much like what pinetree describes, minus Perl.

After having spent a rather long dormant period vis-à-vis programming, I picked up Perl because it is very useful for the kind of work I increasingly find myself doing. I work in the area of computational linguistics, with a heavy emphasis on the linguistics, i.e. I like to focus on rule-based approaches, as opposed to statistical fudging, because if you write your rules well, you can apply them to all kinds of data, whereas statistics are often only applicable to the data you used to generate them.

Anyway, I've found that the knowledge I've gained about Perl and programming in general has, in the last couple of years, broadened by horizons to the extent that I am now considering approaches and projects that were simply beyond me back not too long ago. For one, I tend to use "Find & Replace" in OpenOffice a lot less...

So what sort of things have I been doing that involve Perl:

• Wrote a dictionary tool (thread, code)
• What are the monks doing with Perl and Linguistics?.
• Got linguistic data (newspapers, books, etc.) from various sources (internet, CDs, etc.) and converted it into SGML/XML (or whatever).
• Indexed corpora for our dictionary project's database.
• Tried to help people with topics I know something about (finally!)
• Wrote a suite of scripts to maintain my mutt and procmail installation: alias coloring, generating list filters from list subscriptions, etc.
• Fixing broken HTML, generating web pages.

After a few months of reading and writing a few small scripts (20 - 100 lines, including comments), I came to the conclusion that Perl probably should be my language of choice when confronted with a New Problem, with excursions into Shell or Java (and now C), only when I am forced to. (When 90% of the New Problem is already available as Java classes, it does not really make a huge amount of sense to re-code. Just write the additional class to glue everything together and get out.)

Now my first thought when Management drops a New Problem in my lap is "I wonder what's on CPAN that addresses this...", and I am off. The ability to get a quick'n'dirty mock up of what they want seems to really impress the Management. And the fact that I can flesh out the demo/skeleton into a real application so quickly is a real plus.

Perl lets me do what I want to, with out getting in the way. (You might consider Perl the 'Learned Hand' of program languages -- it tells you how to do what you want to do.)

OGB

I worked in a corporal environment,

You mean in the military? :-P

No no, it means he has a physical body. He is not just a disembodied, Perl-programming spirit.

-- Mike

--
XML::Simpler does not require XML::Parser or a SAX parser. It does require File::Slurp.
-- grantm, perldoc XML::Simpler

Nowadays I mostly write DBA scripts, and maintain the Sybase::* and DBD::Sybase modules.

Michael

I have been writing Perl since it was offered as a programming class in college. Since then I work at a University that needed a Perl programmer for various "in house" tasks. Most of my scripts are for system admin stuff, permissions, data crunching, e-mail users, disk usage, CPU usage etc...

It's very interesting being strictly on windoze but it's fun!