I started using Perl in 1992. I was writing C++ code on a Sun, and had lots of data munging to do. I had been a heavy user of awk, sed and grep, and had written many a script to process data.
I was aware that Perl existed; I suspect I first heard about it in DDJ or, more probably in Computer Language, in the "Exotic Language of the Month" column. Be that as it may, I tried to bootstrap myself, with what information I could glean from technical press articles and geek bulletin boards, like BIX.
I didn't get very far with Perl on my own, and continued to write ever more ambitious awk scripts, and awk scripts to write awk scripts and so on.
Then one day, one of the contractors on the project set aside a morning and taught another guy and me the basics of while( <> ), manipulating arrays and hashes and Perl's particular regexp language.
That was the little push I needed to get me rolling, and from there I was able to do in Perl all sorts of things that otherwise would have required awful awk kluges (for instance, the awk model really starts to fall apart when you have more than one input and one output file), or fastidious error-prone C/C++.
So that's part of the reason I'm here, to try and pay back some of the help I have received myself in the past.
--In reply to Re: A look back on a year of Perl
by grinder
in thread A look back on a year of Perl
by patgas
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