Everyone has their own 'How I discovered Perl' story.
It was shown to me by a college friend (eventually turned co-worker) in his description of his current job. He was doing data conversions from medical billing systems. He described tons of data formatting changes, hundreds of fields per record, hundreds of thousands of records to process. At the time I only new C/C++, so my head was spinning with mallocs, link lists, deletes, dangling pointers, stack overflows, and debugging nightmares. When I asked him how long it took to debug the memory handling alone, he told me about this language he'd come across called Perl (version 4.0 at the time) that handled all that for you. He showed me some code, described how it worked and I was floored.
So, I started learning how to write Perl. Invariably it looked like C code...and quite by accident I enlightened eduardo, jeffa and a few others to Perl along the way.
I've never written any C professionally. I went to work for the company that my friend worked for. With one exception of one Java project, and a little Expect for glue in one project, I've written only Perl for the last six years.
Any other monks that want to share their Perl stories?
/\/\averick
perl -l -e "eval pack('h*','072796e6470272f2c5f2c5166756279636b672');"
In reply to Re: A look back on a year of Perl
by maverick
in thread A look back on a year of Perl
by patgas
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