I was a Unix sysadmin in 1992, and I kept running into folks who told me that Perl was a useful replacement for awk and bourne shell scripts. So I bought the Camel book and read it.

As soon as I saw the open function I knew it was a winner.

In short, I was in the target audience and I started using it for the usual reason. Not a very interesting story, I guess.

--
Mark Dominus
Perl Paraphernalia