In my home node it says "I started using Perl in May 2005 to convert a Word document to TWiki (with pretty successful results) and joined PerlMonks at the end of May." so that must be how it happened. I have a vague memory of a workmate recommending Perl to me for the task. Something about Perl must have appealed because it quickly became my number one tool for writing various tools to automate tasks at work. Following a particularly successful work project I was granted a month of skunk works time so I write an automated build system which became our production build and automated test system for about 10 years until we replaced it with Team City.

My work role has changed to firmware engineer and electronics design support so opportunities for Perl tools have diminished, although I still use Perl to extract information from large sets of data from things like logic analyzers, and plot results.

I still sing the praises of Perl, but the new boys tend much more toward Python. Nothing much to be gained by bucking the trend here - they are more productive in Python and the tools are small in any case. I do quite often get asked about regexes though!

Oh, and these days I'm definitely a programmer even though my first work gig was very electronics focused. Now I feel I've come almost full circle - back to electronic but now combined with programming.