BA and some master's training in psychology (experimental), JD 2003

I serve as a business analyst for Compliance and Legal Technology in an asset management firm. It's not a bad field financially, and I get to code in Perl to make my life easier.

Prior to this, I was a developer at a small-ish securities broker for 7 years. About two years before I left I started seriously investigating Perl; partially because I knew I wouldn't be there (and probably not a developer) forever and that Perl would be useful no matter what I went into.

Perl is sort of the ultimate tool, a super-app for the user who can work with it. Consider, a lot of rather technical users are very good with Excel -- they can program macros, know all the functions, etc. Some of what they do is rather ingenious. The capabilities of the most advanced Excel users, however, pale in comparison to someone who has a working grasp of Perl.

I know Perl is more than a Swiss army knife for the PC, and can be used for quite a bit. However, using it as a Swiss army knife is a huge step up from those who just have a pen knife.