Professional software engineer for 30+ years. Initially used Perl on unix as a combi as a replacement for sed/awk/shell s‎crip‎ting...because the different Companies I worked for used different shells all the time...and I was too lazy to remember all the subtle (and not so subtle) differences. Used Perl on Windows so I had a decent s‎crip‎ting language...still looked upon as very strange for using cmd.exe as my opening line on a windows machine (and who in their right mind wouldn't)...use visa/xp/2000 as testing grounds but write mainly on Ubuntu linux....I still use 5.8 for compatibility with HP and SGI...and try to stick to core Perl (with Tk for GUIs) Found such useful tips on this site...that I thought I ought to give tips of my own when and where applicable... Why do I use Perl? Try finding a quick way to convert floats or doubles in Hex, built on a 64-bit big-endian machine into floats/doubles that can be decoded on a 32-bit little-endian machine in another language...It's a one-liner in perl! Obviously I use Ada or C++ for the big stuff...but off the cuff s‎crip‎ts are a joy to write and invariably I end up putting a GUI on the front end to help those that can't see their way to opening cmd.exe and using my command line version.