Everyone has their own 'How I discovered Perl' story.

It was shown to me by a college friend (eventually turned co-worker) in his description of his current job. He was doing data conversions from medical billing systems. He described tons of data formatting changes, hundreds of fields per record, hundreds of thousands of records to process. At the time I only new C/C++, so my head was spinning with mallocs, link lists, deletes, dangling pointers, stack overflows, and debugging nightmares. When I asked him how long it took to debug the memory handling alone, he told me about this language he'd come across called Perl (version 4.0 at the time) that handled all that for you. He showed me some code, described how it worked and I was floored.

So, I started learning how to write Perl. Invariably it looked like C code...and quite by accident I enlightened eduardo, jeffa and a few others to Perl along the way.

I've never written any C professionally. I went to work for the company that my friend worked for. With one exception of one Java project, and a little Expect for glue in one project, I've written only Perl for the last six years.

Any other monks that want to share their Perl stories?

/\/\averick
perl -l -e "eval pack('h*','072796e6470272f2c5f2c5166756279636b672');"

well maverick, to be 100% precise jeffa was the first person to ever introduce me to perl. i remember we sat around with some "Online Perl Course" that if you completed it, they would send you a certification! (how exciting was that!) Well, I went to work for a company that needed web based "stuff"... and the first few generations of the products I developed for them were in perl. for reasons that i'll never understand, i decided that PHP was better for generation 2 (ugh) and servlets were better for generation 3... (ugh*2) :) i guess i've made my mistakes eh?

so anyways, i knew that you were "good" at perl, and i remember sitting around the lab and doing "snippet" show and tell... where you would say: "see, this is how you unbuffer output, and this is why it is useful!" and I would say something incredibly clever like: "um... isn't there a module on CPAN for that?" :) hehehe... now, 5 years later, I can honestly say that I'm still floored when you say something like: "isn't that in $`?" :) curse you and your damned special variables... but hey, isn't it good to know that there is a publicly traded company out there that is still using something that started out as a recursive pr0n grabber?

I started using Perl in 1992. I was writing C++ code on a Sun, and had lots of data munging to do. I had been a heavy user of awk, sed and grep, and had written many a script to process data.

I was aware that Perl existed; I suspect I first heard about it in DDJ or, more probably in Computer Language, in the "Exotic Language of the Month" column. Be that as it may, I tried to bootstrap myself, with what information I could glean from technical press articles and geek bulletin boards, like BIX.

I didn't get very far with Perl on my own, and continued to write ever more ambitious awk scripts, and awk scripts to write awk scripts and so on.

Then one day, one of the contractors on the project set aside a morning and taught another guy and me the basics of while( <> ), manipulating arrays and hashes and Perl's particular regexp language.

That was the little push I needed to get me rolling, and from there I was able to do in Perl all sorts of things that otherwise would have required awful awk kluges (for instance, the awk model really starts to fall apart when you have more than one input and one output file), or fastidious error-prone C/C++.

So that's part of the reason I'm here, to try and pay back some of the help I have received myself in the past.

g r i n d e r

Just yesterday I made a work collegue go weak at the knees with my perl prowess. He had set aside two hours to manually change all user accounts over to a new group. 5 lines of perl later I left him wondering what to do with the next 2 hours. Perl is just too cool.

I'm now busy trying to keep up with parrot so I can help develop Perl6. I recommend everyone to wander over to dev.perl.org and have a look. It's going to be a blast.

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

He had set aside two hours to manually change all user accounts over to a new group. 5 lines of perl later I left him wondering what to do with the next 2 hours.


I would have thought that was obvious.

perldoc perl :-)

cheers

thinker

We had the web at work in 1994, using the Mosaic web browser and a proxy server. I learned of dynamic content from a French site that showed a different picture on reloads!

I logged into our web server, identified the server process, and figured out where the server was installed. I browsed the server directory and found cgi-bin. I noticed files written in some sort of scripting language. I took home printouts of the scripts.

I spread out the pages on the dining room table. I examined these straightforward yet curious programs for quite a while before looking up at the top of page one:

#!/usr/bin/perl

I had tried to learn perl twice before but had failed both times. I would not fail again!

My odyssey since then has almost, but not quite, exceeded my beliefs in the potiential of this blessed technology.

It should work perfectly the first time! - toma

To name two examples, this month marks my 4'th full year as a programmer. (But I will have to wait for January for my anniversary with using Perl.) And this month also marks merlyn's 40'th birthday.