in reply to A look back on a year of Perl

First off, welcome aboard, and may your future years or Perl be even more enjoyable that your first.

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');"

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Re: Re: A look back on a year of Perl
by eduardo (Curate) on Nov 09, 2001 at 06:59 UTC
    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?
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