After having spent a rather long dormant period vis-à-vis programming, I picked up Perl because it is very useful for the kind of work I increasingly find myself doing. I work in the area of computational linguistics, with a heavy emphasis on the linguistics, i.e. I like to focus on rule-based approaches, as opposed to statistical fudging, because if you write your rules well, you can apply them to all kinds of data, whereas statistics are often only applicable to the data you used to generate them.

Anyway, I've found that the knowledge I've gained about Perl and programming in general has, in the last couple of years, broadened by horizons to the extent that I am now considering approaches and projects that were simply beyond me back not too long ago. For one, I tend to use "Find & Replace" in OpenOffice a lot less...

So what sort of things have I been doing that involve Perl:

• Wrote a dictionary tool (thread, code)
• What are the monks doing with Perl and Linguistics?.
• Got linguistic data (newspapers, books, etc.) from various sources (internet, CDs, etc.) and converted it into SGML/XML (or whatever).
• Indexed corpora for our dictionary project's database.
• Tried to help people with topics I know something about (finally!)
• Wrote a suite of scripts to maintain my mutt and procmail installation: alias coloring, generating list filters from list subscriptions, etc.
• Fixing broken HTML, generating web pages.