I first became interested in Perl because...

Vote on this poll

The regular expressions	67/13%
No need for explicit typing	14/3%
I thought I needed to use it to make CGI scripts	95/19%
all the modules on CPAN	19/4%
it seemed trendy	27/5%
it's very easy to pick up and start writing	157/31%
my employer told me to	90/18%
my friends convinced me to switch to it	44/9%
	513 total votes

Comment on I first became interested in Perl because...

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Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by marto (Cardinal) on Jul 24, 2006 at 08:54 UTC
<joke>chicks dig Perl !</joke> On a serious note, I was working on a crappy VB project, for a crappy employer. The project had no spec written down (and, as is the case when nothing is written down, the spec kept changing). My insane rage fuelled moron boss was unwilling to take control of this. Late one night as he was walking out of the door, he told me to write part of the server side code required for this VB mess, which of course was in Perl. This is why I first became interested in Perl. Having seen how logical Perl was, I got hooked. To me Perl just makes sense. Martin	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by japhy (Canon) on Jul 24, 2006 at 11:49 UTC
My high school taught all its students HTML and we all had web pages (since most of our projects required such knowledge). My web page even went so far as to have a search engine. It consisted of a textbox that you wrote in what you wanted to search for. That emailed me. And then I emailed you back with what pages to go to. No kidding. So then I realized I needed to learn "CGI" so I could write a real search engine for my web site. merlyn can attest to "tecmaster" saying all the wrong things on #perl on EFnet. I got banned a couple times, mostly for asking FAQs and being generally a stupid newbie. After I got over the `@array[$x]`-`&function()` syndrome, I taught a "mini-course" (a three-day course at the end of the school year when there's no real curriculum to go over) on Perl to some of the students. Again, merlyn knows this. I was Jeff 'techmaster' Pinyan, the teaching teen perl hacker! That was 9 years ago. I grew up. Technically, my current moniker, `japhy`, is become more and more outdated daily. I won't be able to keep it much longer... or else I'll have to figure out what else the 'y' can stand for. Jeff `japhy` Pinyan, P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.: Perl, regex, and `perl` hacker How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by merlyn (Sage) on Jul 25, 2006 at 07:28 UTC
I first became interested in Perl because of rn and patch already being firmly in my toolkit, alongside sed and awk. And then, this guy who had written a 25-page manpage (for rn) creates a little 5-page manpage for Perl 1.0, and yet it can do everything awk and sed can do! So, I started with Perl because (a) of the guy who wrote it and (b) it made my awk/sed/shell monstrosities manageable. -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by woolfy (Chaplain) on Jul 24, 2006 at 09:28 UTC
My company started with web development and hosting in 1994 with a Solaris machine. We (me and liz) installed PHP and used it for our first scripts. Very soon we were irritated by the things it could not do, or did badly, and we installed Perl. We fell in love (with Perl) and we still are.	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by arkturuz (Curate) on Jul 24, 2006 at 08:56 UTC
I started with Perl, because it wasn't C. I didn't have to 'int' this, 'float' that, allocate, deallocate... Perl just worked. And it didn't annoy me with some guru messages :-)	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by ForgotPasswordAgain (Priest) on Jul 24, 2006 at 09:54 UTC
I think it was mentioned in a footnote of "sed & awk", or something. I'd been a physics student, and we mostly used VMS, except for our webpages which were on Unix. Unix was much better than VMS, and learning Perl just kind of naturally followed from using Unix and then Linux.	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by tweetiepooh (Hermit) on Jul 24, 2006 at 10:27 UTC
I had to do some text processing and really didn't want to use shell. It just grew from there and the friendly sort of documentation (Learning Perl). This book is a brilliant way to get programming fast with "real" tasks in an aproachable manner. It is also not OO so simple code can be hacked very fast without needing to create objects and interfaces.	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by Velaki (Chaplain) on Jul 24, 2006 at 11:34 UTC
Grep. Sed. Awk. After using a greater number of invocations of them in a single shellscript, I became aware of this new, budding language called Perl. Best glue language I'd seen. Over the years, I kept using this blossoming language, especially for quick reporting. It's still my favorite language, and it has matured to include a great many features never conceived of in the beginning. I still write one-liners with it, and some of those are sometimes humorous. "Perl. There is no substitute."	[reply]
Re^2: I first became interested in Perl because... by Happy-the-monk (Canon) on Jul 30, 2006 at 10:33 UTC
Grep. Sed. Awk. same here, but actually my employer made me, too. And missing from the list: hashs, hashs, hashs (not arrays) all the way made things so dreamily %easy. Cheers, Sören	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by tbone1 (Monsignor) on Jul 24, 2006 at 11:53 UTC
Back in '94 or '95, I was contracting at a well-known American space agency which shall remain nameless and was told "Fred() is leaving, take over his project." It was all in Perl, and it looked similar enough to shell/sed/awk/C that I could pick up a lot of it quickly, and what the hell, it looked a lot more fun than the C++/X-Windows/Motif projects that I still had to do. () The guy's real name wasn't Fred; I just said that to protect his identity. Actually, his name was Rita, but that's another story. -- tbone1, YAPS (Yet Another Perl Schlub) And remember, if he succeeds, so what. - Chick McGee	[reply]
Re^2: I first became interested in Perl because... by jhourcle (Prior) on Jul 24, 2006 at 13:18 UTC
I was surprised that 'I got handed someone else's work' wasn't an option in the poll. In my case, it was 1996, at a university, and we had a 3 person 'web development group' (I did graphics and design work), and the one programmer in our department graduated and got a better job offer -- so Dave and I got all of Tim's work. (Mind you, Dave was a liberal arts major, Tim had been Comp Sci, and I at least had a little bit of programming experience as a kid and some Fortran in my engineering degree.) -- So, I got the work. And when we tried to hire a replacement programmer for our manager, our director decided differently, so I had to maintain all of Tim's work, and write new things as the need arose. (mostly text processing work to convert various text formatting languages to HTML, and a bunch of HTML forms)	[reply]
Re^3: I first became interested in Perl because... by Voronich (Hermit) on Jul 28, 2006 at 18:56 UTC
Yep. That's part of what happened with me. I had a legacy script tossed at me with a "you're smart, fix this." After I fixed it and created a couple of my own the bang for the buck became quickly obvious. I still have not found any language where I can get so much done with so little so quickly.	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by McDarren (Abbot) on Jul 24, 2006 at 08:31 UTC
Peer pressure, definitely. Several years ago, some guys at a company I worked for in Sydney decided to setup an internal IRC server. So everybody in the office would chat away on IRC everyday (this was before IM became popular). Anyway, the "haves" (those that knew Perl) would be forever showing off in front of the "have-nots" (those that didn't) by pasting their fancy one-liners into the IRC channel. Eventually it got the better of me and I had to get into the act. I still can't write a decent one-liner to save myself, but hey - it's been fun :)	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by davido (Cardinal) on Jul 24, 2006 at 16:04 UTC
I don't really see the option that I would pick: It was a good tool for a task I needed to accomplish. When cell phones first gained the capability to receive text "pages", back when you had to actually use software specific to a particular carrier to dial into their system to send the text page, I thought it would be cool to set up an Internet based paging gateway. The gateway would dial into the cell service's paging system and send a text message. Later I tied it into a procmail filter so that my cell phone would receive the subject line and limited 'from' information on any email message where priority was set to high and the sender was in my 'accept' list. This was back in about 1996 or 1997, during the days of the Motorola Flip phones, and the Nokia 2160 (if memory serves). I got a lot of help on the project from my really great ISP. Perl was brand new to me, and without the ISP's guidance I wouldn't have had the skillset necessary. As a matter of fact, they ran the gateway on their server and used the same phone line that they had previously dedicated to only a fax server. The fun lasted for about a year, until the cell company improved accessibility to their paging system by assigning a real email address to any cell phone capable of displaying text messages. Later true SMS was rolled out by my cell provider, and the whole thing became obsolete. But it was kind of a cool toy while it lasted. Then other hobbies took me away from Perl for a few years, and then finally I re-learned (in much more depth) with the help of a lot of books and the PerlMonks website, beginning in around 2002. So I guess in my case a pet project was implemented in Perl. I chose Perl based both on recommendations as well as things I had read about it online. Later, after some time away, I came back to Perl because I remembered how intreguing it had been during the first, brief, go-around. Dave	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by zakame (Pilgrim) on Jul 24, 2006 at 09:37 UTC
I've been using various CGI scripts since 5 or so years ago (remember Matt?), but at that time I never bothered to learn Perl deeply, just barely scratching the surface with the common denominator to C, et al. Only quite recently did I get to use Perl frequently, ever since stumbling upon an old copy of the Blue Camel from someone named Anthony Ettinger, at the used-books bin here in Manila. Cheers to him for helping me start out! :D	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by GrandFather (Saint) on Jul 24, 2006 at 23:17 UTC
The letter keys on my keyboard were worn out and it looked like you could write Perl using mostly symbol keys and the fact that the result looks like swearing was a bonus. :) DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by gregor42 (Parson) on Jul 24, 2006 at 13:36 UTC
OK, so I have to put it all in historical context. This was in the early 90's... So my answers are colored by that: Because I was able to use it to break out of a dead-end desktop support career to become a full-time developer Because it was the closest thing to a "cross-platform" language that existed at the time. (This was prior to the Java "write once, run anywhere" mantra) Because I could grok it almost immediately after hacking bash scripts for a few months and beating my head against C for a couple of years & getting nowhere. Wait! This isn't a Parachute, this is a Backpack!	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by JediWizard (Deacon) on Jul 24, 2006 at 14:35 UTC
While I voted for "it's very easy to pick up and start writing", there really is some "my employer told me to" mixed in there. Having not written any code since sophmore year of highschool, I found my self working with a bunch of perl scripts written by the engineers at my company (at the time I was doing data entry), and was faced with the descision between fix the broken and poorly written perl script, or go home without pay. From there is was a matted of time before I was writting my own perl scripts, and just a hop, skip, and a jump from becoming an engineer myself. They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. —Andy Warhol	[reply] [d/l]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by rir (Vicar) on Jul 24, 2006 at 16:12 UTC
Other: it was a better sed & awk than sed & awk.	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by spiritway (Vicar) on Jul 24, 2006 at 17:58 UTC
I'm thinking substance abuse or head injury ;-) Seriously, it was Perl's easy availability, the whole Perl philosophy as I understood it then (mainly from things Larry Wall had said). The idea that I could actually get things done without having to learn everything about the language. CPAN and PM were also important, but I didn't learn about them right away. Mostly it was that Perl would let me just get started without having to declare all my variables (or any of them), without having to create a main routine, without having to announce to the world every last module I wanted to use (until I figured that part out). It fit in with my way of thinking, which isn't nice and linear like some peoples', but tends to wander around on the way from here to there.	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by Cristoforo (Curate) on Jul 24, 2006 at 19:35 UTC
After programming in Pascal, C and C++ in college courses, I found how easy it was to do common tasks in Perl. No need to predeclare variables, the ease of opening files for reading or writing, and probably the major draw was reading Programming Perl. Who thought you could read a technical text that was written with a sense of humor?	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by astroboy (Chaplain) on Jul 24, 2006 at 10:45 UTC
The customer couldn't decide if the app was going to be deployed on Unix or Windows, but they needed me to start developing asap. Although I have always worked in IT, I had a pretty balanced life. Now my wife is a Perl widow ;-)	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by rodion (Chaplain) on Jul 24, 2006 at 21:13 UTC
I got good at awk. I made it do all sorts of things, including provide cron services on an MSDOS box, back when MSDOS wasn't old, and before windows had accessable. Then I saw perl. Wow! It supported code that was so much saner and easier.	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by Anonymous Monk on Jul 24, 2006 at 13:25 UTC
Shell scripts were too ugly; a maze of pipelines, without anything to debug when the whole house of cards came tumbling down. Perl was an imperative language like C, except garbage collected, and with many features for writing shell scripts ( sed compatiblity mode, awk compatibility mode), but more powerful than the various shell tools it replaced. In other words, because it wasn't C, wasn't shell scripts, and Python and the other, cleaner languages hadn't been invented yet...	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by lorn (Monk) on Jul 24, 2006 at 14:26 UTC
I first became interested in Perl because, i like IRC, and always see 'bot people' and ask "who, what this is made?" and the answer is, Perl ;) before i started i like parsing text Lorn -http://lornlab.org -slackwarezine.com.br	[reply]
Actually, it was pure laziness by pemungkah (Priest) on Jul 25, 2006 at 22:41 UTC
We switched from IBM mainframes to Unix at NASA back in the late 80's (just about when Perl 5 came out). One of the field engineers for the Convex machines said, "Look, you could learn shell, sed, awk, and C, or you could just learn Perl and do everything you want to anyway." It was good advice.	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by stonecolddevin (Parson) on Jul 24, 2006 at 18:31 UTC
At the time i started playing around with perl, i guess i thought i needed it for CGI scripts. ASP, PHP, and Ruby weren't really around, or if they were i definitely hadn't heard about them. My friend from california got me started on it, i was wanting to make some simple message board stuff for Mechwarrior 3 clan websites, only to find out it's a little more involved than just -poof- message board! :-) meh.	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by johngg (Canon) on Jul 24, 2006 at 22:13 UTC
I saw an article on Perl in Dr. Dobbs which piqued my interest. I found a copy of perl 4.036 on a Sun User Group Deutschland CDROM so I installed it to try. Perl has been my language of choice ever since. I just loved the way you can throw strings around without breaking sweat. When I think back to C and strcopy, strthis, strthat ... the pain you had to go through. Cheers, JohnGG	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by jrdepriest (Initiate) on Jul 24, 2006 at 23:08 UTC
I was in charge of managing a depart-level NT domain and all of the workstations in it (only about 20). Batch files were quickly rules out as useful admin tools and vbscript wasn't even a choice to me. However, I did discover something fancy in a resource kit: Kixtart. It was fantastic because it was so similar to BASIC it let me use the year of BASIC I had in high school. Even with that, it wasn't long before I hit the wall. There were things I needed to do that Kixtart was not able to do for me. Another tidbit in the resource kit was an old version of Active State perl. I downloaded the newest version avaialble at the time and ordered some Win32 / Perl books. Diving into Perl and discovering PPM and CPAN modules, I realized that there was absolutely nothing that this language could not accomplish for me. It was euphoric. I was hooked and I use perl on a daily basis. I am in data security now and don't manage workstations, servers, or a domain, but perl has been extremely useful in automating long running or tedious tasks (such as scanning a network looking for systems that someone has logged on to and, if found, copying all of the files from their profile to a central repository; or running the magic 'file' program against misnamed temp files and taking action based on the file type; or even stitching together split dd file images into a single image file). Anything any other language can do, perl can do.	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by hv (Prior) on Jul 25, 2006 at 13:23 UTC
Having previously professionally used mainly assembler and C (along with a bit of BCPL and BASIC), my job writing a system in TCL to replace a crufty legacy C application had been obsoleted (canned by a new manager), but nobody had got around to firing me yet. So I was looking around for things to do, and trying to be helpful to the sysadmins, and looking a bit further into some languages I had previously rejected before settling on TCL for the original project. One of those languages was Perl, and I was starting to find it quite useful for all sorts of little things. A couple of months later, someone messed up an update to the legacy system, and substantial chunks of the data used by a 15,000-strong online community of paying customers were destroyed. At this point it was discovered that the incremental backups were unusable, so the last full backup (several days old) was the only recovery option available; a full restore was unthinkable, but restoring only what was available of the missing data would also leave the system incompatible with each user's stored pointers, creating very visible problems. Since I was already intimate with the structure of the various files involved (sequential mixes of fixed-size headers and variable-length data), I told that same new manager that in an hour I could write a perl script that would traverse all the user pointer files, crosscheck them against the partially restored data, and create placeholders for any missing data; this would be a minimal fix before we could allow the users to get back onto the system without it all falling over. My boss's support helped overcome his scepticism (thanks Gordon :), and an hour later the script was ready. That got me hooked on perl as a lifesaver, and I never looked back - I've toyed with many other languages in the 10+ years since then, but never yet found anything that remotely threatened to supplant my affection for perl. Hugo	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by Mago (Parson) on Jul 24, 2006 at 09:13 UTC
The magic who exists in the language ! <error>~~The community if dedicating to the development and in the growth of the Perl.~~</error> The community dedicating in development and growth of Perl. ----- Another reason to love Perl is that isn't necessary to be a fluent english speaker to program. I'm not Anonymous Monk !! Mago mago@rio.pm.org	[reply]
Re^2: I first became interested in Perl because... by Anonymous Monk on Jul 25, 2006 at 23:32 UTC
Another reason to love Perl is that isn't necessary to be a fluent english speaker to program. As someone who has to maintain code for a living, let me be the first to say that that is NOT a good thing!!! :-( ;-( :-(	[reply]
Re^3: I first became interested in Perl because... by rhesa (Vicar) on Jul 25, 2006 at 23:34 UTC
That depends on how much you want to work for your living...	[reply]
Re^4: I first became interested in Perl because... by Anonymous Monk on Jul 27, 2006 at 14:13 UTC
Re^2: I first became interested in Perl because... by Anonymous Monk on Jul 25, 2006 at 03:49 UTC
Oh my gosh... Can someone please explain me what this guy is trying to saying? Oh, I see... I knew my Portuguese skills would be useful someday! caraca, seu ingles nao e' ruim... e' horrivel, e' podre pra kct! Onde vc aprendeu a escrever assim? Usar "if" no lugar do pronome "se" foi o cumulo... O resto entao, nem se fala... Vc escreve Perl assim tbm ou e' pior?	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by CountZero (Bishop) on Jul 24, 2006 at 18:35 UTC
Back in the days of Perl 4 on an Atari ST, it was the only way to easily transform a bunch of text files from one format into another and besides I was the only one in our computer club doing Perl, so that made me automatically the resident specialist on Perl. CountZero "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by poqui (Deacon) on Jul 24, 2006 at 22:16 UTC
Regexen fer shure dude! I was a lowly Oracle DBA and report sql writer for the soon to become Data Warehouse group, and I was asked to make a change to an existing perl script, to fine tune a regex that wasn't working anymore. I was picked because no one else had any perl experience, and I was interested in learning new things, and I had good ksh experience. I must admit, it wasn't love at first sight; and I didn't do much with it; but after being laid off and moving to a job with very little to do; I found a home at perlmonks. Thanks all you perl monks and mongers!	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by coreolyn (Parson) on Jul 27, 2006 at 17:36 UTC
A big factor in my initial usage of Perl was Larry Wall's State of the Onion addresses. I had to check out a language that came from such a mind. coreolyn	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by TedPride (Priest) on Jul 30, 2006 at 18:10 UTC
I first became interested in Perl waaay back when WWWBoard was just starting to be in vogue. I wanted to add some dynamic content to my parents' site in the form of forums, web forms, guestbook, etc., but the only available scripts had a horribly ugly interface and limited security / moderation features. So I learned Perl to modify the scripts. Of course, the code I came up with back then was pretty lousy, and I didn't really get much beyond the newbie level until I found Perlmonks.	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by jkva (Chaplain) on Jul 26, 2006 at 10:39 UTC
Hm, I started writing Perl because I saw the book in the bookstore when I was browsing for a new language to pick up. It seemed cool from what I saw when flipping through the book. Still learning... :)	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by shenme (Priest) on Jul 27, 2006 at 15:56 UTC
Missing option: ... it is more useful *more places* Not quite like Astroboy. Rather the application I was replacing "used to be on a Unix system, has to run now on Windows NT, and who knows what they'll want to move to in the future." I looked around with the question in mind "What's portable enough and powerful enough that I can actually get this done?" Learn, churn, done. So Perl was not an accidental choice. And moving the apps around has been easy enough that mgmt never clued into how clueless they were. (I guess that makes me a success ...)	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by samizdat (Vicar) on Jul 27, 2006 at 17:23 UTC
Late to the party... :) I was handed a working transaction-processing website (in 1997) that was a mass of Perl CGI scripts, and only did half of what my employer wanted it to do. I was cheaper than the design company, even though I'd programmed firmware in assembler and designed boards for most of my career. FreeBSD and Perl were love at first sight! :D Don Wilde "There's more than one level to any answer."	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by talexb (Chancellor) on Jul 25, 2006 at 18:14 UTC
I'd used `awk` to do some file processing at a previous employer about '96 or '97 after rewriting almost identical C programs about a dozen times to do roughly the same task. When I started working at a new job, I needed a similar tool to do some text mangling. `Perl` seemed to be much more flexible than `awk` and faster to develop than a C program, and, as someone else has said already, there didn't seem to be anything it couldn't do. It worked really well, was fast to develop and to execute, and that led to a one-time contract for a web site guy, which led to lots of work during the Internet boom. Fun stuff. Thanks Larry! Alex / talexb / Toronto "Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because...(My Employer) by cerelib (Novice) on Jul 31, 2006 at 19:55 UTC
At the multi-national corporation in which I work, we use Perl for many tools. When I first started here as an intern, one of my first jobs was hacking one of these tools to add a new feature. Coming from an academic Java background, I was horrified when I first looked at Perl. Read more... (1021 Bytes)	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by Moriarty (Abbot) on Jul 27, 2006 at 04:48 UTC
It wasn't so much my employer telling me to use. It was more that others here were using it then leaving the company, which left quite a few jobs that had to be maintained.	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by tubaandy (Deacon) on Jul 25, 2006 at 17:22 UTC
Peer pressure from Brett S. And it did everything I needed it to do. Andy	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by blue_cowdawg (Monsignor) on Jul 26, 2006 at 01:06 UTC
My original reason for switching to Perl wasn't one of the choices listed in the poll.... For me it all started when I was writing a series of scripts to manage my backups. At one point I had a few dozen Bourne shell scripts with all sorts of piping going on between grep, awk, sed, tr, and a few other Unix commands. My chosen project had already started to become unmanageable. When I was introduced to Perl by way of several postings on Usenet I discovered that I could simplify my project into one master script. No calling out to and piping to and from awk, sed and all sorts of other stuff. Oh yeah... and the pattern matching stuff was neat. When Object Oriented Programming was introduced to Perl a while back I was really off to the races! Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by g0n (Priest) on Jul 26, 2006 at 11:01 UTC
.. of Net::LDAP to start with. Text manipulation and DBI make directory integration a lot easier, but Net::LDAP is IMHO the most flexible, resilient & usable LDAP api in any language. -------------------------------------------------------------- "If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing." John Brunner, "The Shockwave Rider". Can you spare 2 minutes to help with my research? If so, please click here	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by sir_lichtkind (Friar) on Jul 28, 2006 at 12:06 UTC
initially just because i was too lazy to write make scripts and run them all the time. my kepher at http://proton-ce.sourceforge.net	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by oblate kramrdc (Acolyte) on Jul 30, 2006 at 16:57 UTC
a humor spread in our college that the only thesis titles that would be approved are those who are related to a compiler design or similar topics... So i came up with the idea of a programming language converter as our thesis and guess what it was approved only to find out that other easier topics were approved... Grrr... and we are told that we should only use open source languages! and i'm not very familiar with open source languages So I asked a friend of mine who is a good open source programmer(eman a.k.a. blood pet) what language should i use... and he highly recommended Perl for its powerful string manipulation capabilities... Now, am still studying perl reading tutorials and sample scripts... that's how i found PERL MONKS... and now i'm an oblate! Falling under the spell of PERL... PERL.. PERL.. PERL... PERL... PERL... PERL.. PERL...	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by gloryhack (Deacon) on Jul 26, 2006 at 05:20 UTC
I picked up Perl because Larry dresses like a parrothead so I figured Perl had to be the coolest language ever. I don't know that Larry's even heard of Jimmy Buffett, but Perl is already the ultimate reality language and getting better every day. Give us a rock solid compiler for Perl and I'll forget everything else I ever knew. C, C++, washing my hands after using the bathroom, my name...	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by mk. (Friar) on Jul 26, 2006 at 17:41 UTC
it was all his fault! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "one who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; one who does not ask a question remains a fool forever." mk at rio dot pm dot org	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by AK108 (Friar) on Jul 26, 2006 at 04:28 UTC
Other: I was the webmaster of a site that had one of those awful remotely hosted bulletin boards. I decided that we needed to be able to modify the board to add features for the community. So, I found a PHP-based board that was similar to the current board, but quickly found and liked the Perl version. I learned Perl to modify the board around 2.5 years ago. I like Perl now because it's simple to get something done. The modules that I've just recently started using are awesome, and it makes things a whole lot easier. I like that I can focus on the new programming to be done, and not reinvent the wheel.	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by DarkClaw (Acolyte) on Aug 02, 2006 at 20:00 UTC
It was definitely a comparison thing. Originally I went for C, but as time went by I wanted a web technology. Though I knew PHP was gaining fame, it seemed to me that PHP was too narrow and specialized, and inherently weaker than Perl with a good templating system. Picking up Programming Perl was the smartest thing I did at that point, because Larry Wall's way of presenting Perl impressed me strongly and convinced me to plunge into it. Besides, to me it seemed more advantageous to use a "big" language like Perl which I could use on many other applications than a little, apparently derivative language like PHP. And obviously ASP, ColdFusion and Java were too proprietary for me to be interested. Finally the deciding factor was CPAN; and I was right.	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by msk_0984 (Friar) on Jul 28, 2006 at 04:41 UTC
hi monks Good to see evrery ones reply but i have voted for " Since my employer told me to " Becos when you are in an organistaion and working for it then you would definetly learn or be trained on the requirement they need and the best way they could reach to their targets. And also since most of the time we are in the office and working for the organistation in there requirement either it may be Perl or any other language and by the time we leave to our place and reach home we try to spend with our family and closed ones. Have a gr8 day monks	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by thoglette (Scribe) on Jul 28, 2006 at 04:55 UTC
..the guy who's work I took over had written a VHDL simulator control script in Perl. I thought I'd just tweak it a bit to add a feature - after all one line shouldn't matter Then it was just one more file - this was Perl 4 Soon I was writing C-parsers and using modules. Then Perl 5 came along and I was hooked. Massive bodies of production code, arcane one liners and training graduates It got to the point that the first thing I'd do at a new site was convince the IT dept. to let me install Perl on whatever machine I touched. *Please* help me find a 12-step program before I submit a bug-fix (shudder). -- Butlerian Jihad now!	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by Scarborough (Hermit) on Jul 28, 2006 at 13:57 UTC
Pleased to see I'm not the only one who thought PERL was the only way to write CGI programs. I'm a bit dudious about people saying its the ease of writing, surely you don't know that until you start. This survey raised a smile on this Friday afternoon when all I want to do is get to the beach at Caton Bay, thank you.	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by Tosco (Novice) on Apr 27, 2007 at 12:48 UTC
The regular expressions !!!	[reply]
Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by Anonymous Monk on Aug 02, 2006 at 21:16 UTC
Because paco told me to.	[reply]

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