Thanks BrowserUk,

Perl was my "gateway" language so to speak, but during my early, core years of the tech 'revolution', that's what was prevalent. I dove in because I wanted to become a better sysadmin, and further, I wanted a way to better automation to a slew of routers/switches, and Perl, which is all I knew (at a basic level) was the way forward.

Sometime in the mid 2ks, I found Mark Jason-Dominus' Higher Order Perl. I was still kind of struggling with references at this time. I printed the whole book off (it's free!) on single-sided paper, took it home, and re-re-read all of it. That was at a time in my life that was tumultuous on the 'life' side to say the least. What it did was show me that there's a bit more to this, and all languages that can be exploited beyond what one runs across.

Now, I am exceptionally fluent in Perl and Python, can write and read most C/C++, code in C# without difficulty and have been forced to quickly understand and write in languages that are custom (when I first learned Perl, I never imagined corps could have custom langs), and what is one of the most important things, it helped me understand APIs.

It's taught me that one can tell an API by its smell even. Being able to write in a language and just 'get' the declaration was pretty big for me. That said, it's brought along the expectation that an API author ought to have quality documentation for it and promptly update it when its recognized or pointed out that 'code don't match docs'.

Last but not least, Perl has also taught me that languages that don't have an as easy-to-implement unit test platform,... suck.