I started with Perl a few years ago when the marketing guy at my company decided that he needed a cgi form handler on our corporate website. He used a form handling script which was given to him by his web hosting company, which was a somewhat modified formmail.pl from MSA. Well, the guy learned enough Perl to magle the script into something mroe useful but wanted a "real programmer" to modify it into something better. I didn't know Perl at all but knew C and some other langs, so I gave it a whirl.

At that time, I learned from Perl in a Nutshell only, and learned enough from that plus perldoc plus web info to know what I was doing and make a fairly safe formmail.pl replacement to fit the requirements. Then I went back to my C coding and forgot about the whole thing.

Then, my local LUG had a Perl/Tk presentation, with a bit of background on learning Perl and such. I was inspired not only by Perl/Tk but by Perl itself, to the point that I later went on to use Perl wherever possible until this present day.

The Perl/Tk presentation also had the added benefit of saving me from creating a UI using the C curses lib, I used Perl/Tk instead and made the boss even happier.

Now, being a programmer in bioinformatics, Perl is not only tolerated but is the preferred language. It's one thing that seems to bridge the gap between the biologists and programmers, a common language spoken by two types of people who don't see eye to eye on many things.

felonious

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