When I was about 9 years old, the games of an Apple 2/c or the like became boring. Then I found a floppy disk with an introduction into Applesoft Basic. About one year later I bought my first computer book about applesoft basic and started hacking (making the computer games more or less difficult, writing own games like mastermind, ...). When I was about 13, my father bought a 286 with 20 MHz CPU, 1 MB RAM and 2x 20MB HDD!. Then I tried first GWBASIC, then Quickbasic, and with the latter my programs grew, I started prefering gosub to goto (I sold my first program when I was about 14 for about an apple and an egg)

When I was about 16, I started with TurboPascal, and later at university, a professor tried to teach me professional programming. With the age of about 19 I started with C and with 22 with C++ and - since I liked Pascal very much - Delphi. With 24 I started with Java, but I thought it as a nice tool for creating GUIs, but nothing for a "real man" ;-)

With 24 I had The First Contact with Perl (in 1997). A friend of mine had to write Perl/CGI-Scripts for his lessons and asked me for help "... because C looks quite the same...". Well, together we committed some perl crimes and got his script running somehow. I liked the string handling functionality, but this "language" was by far too dirty for me.

In 1998 I applied for a summer vaccation at Siemens which needed someone to program perl scripts. Well ok, then let's do it (I needed money for a new computer)

Equipped with "Learning Perl", "Programming Perl" and "Advanced Perl Programming" I started the job. My fist task was to convert a program to "use strict" (and somebody taught me -w and gave me a short intro into Regular Expressions). With use strict and -w Perl suddenly looked like a nice programming language, especially REs and - a little bit later - hashes. I read "Learning Perl" and "Programming Perl" until I nearly knew those books by heart.

Since 1999, I'm a freelancer who writes his code about 90% in Perl (the rest are C and Tcl) and (since 2000) develops Metadirectories (very often with Workflows in Perl)