Anyone else around who have claimed "I'm not a programmer"

Don't think I could - not with a straight face, anyway. Despite little in the way of formal training I've pretty much always been a programmer. The 8-bit glory days started me off properly but even before that there were sorts of proto-programming available if you could recognise the signs. I have had straight-up "programmer" gigs (including a genuine period of employment back in the day) so, yes, I am a programmer.

In old-timer terms, I am part of the 4.036 crowd. I was aware of Perl before that (thanks to usenet) and was aware that it could outstrip the sed and awk with which I was familiar but there did seem to be quite a learning curve even back then. The gawk man page was about 25 sheets of 11x14 but perl was well over 100 - a bit daunting when you just wanted it for some quick hack or other. Finally I gave in and started to plough through the docs when a task came up that was just too gnarly for awk and I really didn't fancy doing text manipulation in C.

Perl has been my language of choice since Y2K. CGI first and then mod_perl showed me that it could do crazy, fantastic things and all with the DWIM style that was already familiar. I started visiting the monastery not long after that (maybe 2002ish) but always anonymously and then just to read and absorb and be inspired by what I found. Finally signed up in 2011 but lurked for another year before posting.

So, I'm still around. But lots of others are not and that is a shame but is also the way of the world. It is also encouraging to see some recent arrivals with good knowledge and/or good questions to ask.

This is still the place to be.