I've been programming in Perl since 1995. The first year and a half, I did some webstuff with it, but nowadays, I hardly do webstuff. The only webstuff I do are some cron jobs that generate simple HTML files.

I've used Perl in all of the many jobs I've had since 1996, although the only programming job I had in those 7 years lasted for a mere 10 weeks. In all other cases, I used Perl to write tools to make my (work) life easier. This varied from one-liners to move around some files, to a project that modified/created about 500 files containing SQL statements, generating over 75,000 lines of SQL code. Most of the Perl I've written, and most of what I write nowadays could be considered "systems coding". If I wouldn't have had Perl, most of my code would be in sh and AWK. I'd also say that most of my programs are less than 100 lines, and using more than 200 is rare. Most of my programs do just one thing, and are specifically written to do that thing. A large fraction, probably more than half of the programs I write, run only once (not counting test runs), and are discarded afterwards.

And I can say the same about what I do with Perl at home. Except that at home, I also write Perl code just to experiment, or to do fun and exciting things, like creating whacky regexes and JAPHs.

Abigail