It was in a long forgotten era. Apache didn't exist yet. Mosaic ruled the webbrowser market, Netscape had just released its first betas. Microsoft was thinking they could ignore the existance of the Internet. Eternal September had only just started. Life was still good.

A division of a very large consumer electronics company wanted to have a website. All they had was a corrupted (ASCII) dump of a database, with lots of typos and a CD-ROM with images of their products. We had 160 hours to create a website.

I created a large bunch of shell and AWK programs that would create the website out of the database dump and the CD-ROM. Running time: over 3 hours to generate about 500 html pages and a 1000 images. (They came with a new dump and new images the day before we went "life")

After that, I was sure it could have been done better in a different language than sh and AWK (although you can do pretty amazing things in AWK if you know it well). Hence, I learned myself Perl. I had 4.036 on my computer, but after less than an hour playing with it, I wanted to use multidimensional arrays. Not supported by 4.036, so I joined the Usenet group, realized there was perl5, downloaded it, and started studying the manual pages.

I've hardly used another language since.

Abigail

In reply to Re: Rolling into Perl by Abigail-II
in thread Rolling into Perl by robartes

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.