When Perl 1 came along, I downloaded it and compiled it, but decided it wasn't powerful enough to replace my mishmash of sed/awk/grep/emacs-lisp scripts.

Then Perl 2 was posted, and I started playing with it. While the occasional odd task still needed to be shelled out, I found myself not only writing new things with this new language, but even rewriting some of my older functioning things just for grins.

And as I was cruising comp.unix.questions, I started noticing (and posting) how many of those things could be done in one line of Perl, or at least far fewer lines than the other traditional solutions. It got to the point where I was posting so many Perl answers there that people started saying "no Perl" in their questions!

And after that fateful post in September 1989 in which I suggested a book on Perl, and O'Reilly contacted me to get things rolling (resulting in the Camel book 16 months later), I was thrust into the Perl limelight.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker