I think my first meeting with Perl was a glancing shot in some high tech magazine -- some guy had an encryption algorithm tatooed on his arm. The algorithim was expressed in Perl. The question below the photo was, could he leave the United States, because that could be construed as exporting munitions?

Well, that was a long walk (as Johnny Carson would say), but that meant I had pigeon-holed Perl as a language like APL -- very complex, and only brilliant people attempt it.

After I'd been into Perl for a few years I found the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup -- that cured me of the 'only brilliant people' part. And, yes, it is complex, much more complex than the components of C (from where I got to Perl) but that's OK.

So why use Perl?

• It lets me get the job done.
• It allows me lots of different ways to say something.
• It allows me to be modular.
• I can format it like C, a language I used for most of my careere, and that's nice.
• It allows me to be Object Oriented.
• It runs on many different platforms.
• The user community is terrific.