Are you kidding? I'm constantly coming back to Perl after drinking the Kool-Aid of some other language. And there is usually a stage of reorientation as I remember that Perl is a language, complete with punctuation and poetry. To paraphrase a line off of the Python site, the annual decision to keep using Perl is one of my little rituals :-)

Heck, I've even done almost the exact same project idea to rebuild my confidence. I called mine "DoltPad", and I think I had just gotten cut and paste working before I got an idea for a "real" project.

So here's what I do when I feel the need to rebuild my interest in Perl:

• Grab Programming Perl or some other book, flip to a random page, and start reading
• Look at some CPAN module I tried to reinvent while I was using another language. See if it has added anything new or exciting since I last looked at it
• Try my hand at some Perl poetry
• Try my hand at some Perl obfuscation
• Go to Perlmonks and select a Random Node until a lightbulb goes off in my head
• Think of some relatively small but challenging project that I could do in Perl, and get to it
• Talk to any Java evangelist for an extended period of time

These are just a few tricks, and they aren't in any particular order. Oh, and you haven't "lost" anything. At most, you've gotten rusty or forgotten stuff. Start using Perl more everything will snap back into place. Most of us are a lot smarter than we give ourselves credit for.

I just realized that I was using the same sig for nearly three years.

Well, I want to know if any of you have been in the same boat. Has work, time, life, etc kept you away from Perl? How did you get back to it? Are you trying to get back or are you wondering what you were thinking and running far, far away?

What kept me away? Two rather heavy project courses. Last term, I wrote a compiler front-end pretty much from scratch (while taking four other courses). I didn't really want to do much hacking when I came home from twelve-hour days in the lab alternately debugging a bison grammar written by someone else and fiddling with FFT code whose output didn't quite fit with the textbook's dictum.

How did I get back into it? A couple things. First, I have a fair bit of Perl code hanging about, doing various behind-the-scenes but important things on the server I'm adminning. When I realized that this term gave me more free time than last term did, I decided to start putting more time into maintenance, and start chipping away at my to-implement feature list. Second, a friend asked me to serve as local Perl guru for a project he's embarking on. That got me back into reading my (and his) Perl, but didn't quite get me back up to the point I was at a year or so ago, when I was hacking Perl full-time.

What to do?

Come right on back to Perl Monks. In the past week or so, I've been exposed to other people's problems, solutions, comments, ideas, and opinions. It's a wonderfully mind-broadening experience.

Now if only I could find the same push to get back into Lisp hacking....

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F o x t r o t U n i f o r m
Found a typo in this node? /msg me
The hell with paco, vote for Erudil!

Perhaps you should try to write a GUI text editor using POE (see http://poe.perl.org/ - basically POE is event based programming in Perl) and the GTK+ Perl modules. You should be able to prototype an editor with not very many lines of code.

Have a look on the POE site for examples using Gtk; who knows, it might be your bag.

$h=$ENV{HOME};my@q=split/\n\n/,`cat $h/.quotes`;$s="$h/."
."signature";$t=`cat $s`;print$t,"\n",$q[rand($#q)],"\n";
[download]

I will definitely take a look at POE. I think I checked it out a while ago and hadn't been back. I was already planning on using GTK+ for the GUI aspects, so this seems right up my alley. Thanks for the suggestion!

Personally, I'm not RE-claiming Perl, as I just started out using it. I'm rather CLAIMING it... and having a difficult time in doing so...

The company I work for is "not into open source stuff" as they call it themselves. Which in practice means that they do all the one-off jobs either by hand, either by $1000+++ solutions.

Well... it's their money and time, I suppose

So I started out using Perl myself for some of the jobs that come with the project I'm working on. (Sneaky uh?)
Naturally, I can't work on Perl all of the time, so advancing in Perl is a bit like advancing in a traffic jam for the moment: go...stop...go...stop...

Besides that, I started out re-writing a java html pre-processor I've been using for the last 2 years ... in my spare time of course.
This already has proven very helpfull in understanding the OO side of Perl.

It's just a matter of re-claiming your own time, in my opinion... hard enough in itself...

Cheers!
Michaeld.

As well, you probably aren't looking for an outright "hand out" for your notepad project, but if you get stuck (assuming you go with Perl/Tk) feel free to check out medit, a notepad-like editor that I wrote.