pre-Perl

As briefly hinted in Re^2: Roads to Perl, my first programming language has been Pascal, taught at high school -- an experimental course, back then. Later on I felt I had to learn C and C++ too, and I bought Borland's Turbo C++ for DOS, which was the cheapest one available, that I knew of... but then for over a decade I abandoned it completely. When I came to Linux I started giving a peek into it again, but couldn't really get the hang of it.

In those early days, surprising as it may be, the language in which I was regularly programming in was the RPN based one of my HP-28s pocket calculator. And I must say, in full earnestness, that I was quite proficient with it. I still like it, although I only use it sporadically now and I'm not that skilled anymore.

Then I had my unpleasant encounter with BASIC, also described in Re^2: Roads to Perl. Nothing else to say about this...

I also learnt some markup languages, although these probably won't count in this list for many of you! Most notably, LaTeX, and I think that - also thanks to te kind contributors of ctt - I never got those bad habits so many of which are so widespread in that area. I must admit though, that while on the one hand I can write decent, well-structured documents and I'm aware of many useful packages, on the other one I haven't the slightest of the required skills to do anything really "advanced" with the underlying TeX engine.

After having come to Linux, "of course", I couldn't help learning some shell scripting, and I know it not that bad, but I'm sure there could be a lot to learn about it. But who cares? Now I use Perl to accomplish any task that at fisrt sight is not suitable for the shell... and also many that could be suitable for it!!

Perl

The story of how I actually entered in contact with Perl is described here: My first approach to Perl. How has been yours?, at which node I started a thread that happens to be fundamentally a duplicate of this one, which I hadn't noticed...