It was 1998. A functional analyst at one of the locations we supported wanted some paper reports that the system was printing daily to be on the Web. I heard Perl was good for such things. I got the Camel and put it together in what was considered record time.

Other estimates for this simple project by other programmers came in at taking many times longer and I had to learn Perl.

Reminded me of an experience I'd had 15 years earlier. Management was considering purchasing an embedded systems product for resale. Our group would have to support the product if we bought the technology. We were given a large body of assembly code that was formatted according to the conventions of this oddball postfix assembler this group had written for themselves. We had some commercial cross development tools with an assembler. Management came to the senior programmers and asked if they could convert the oddball assembler to our assembler's format. They came up with huge estimates on the order of 2-4 weeks based on hand conversion. I was asked and I said that it looked like a job for SNOBOL, to which I had had some exposure back in school. I ran out and got Griswold's book on SNOBOL, for reference, and tore into it and had it done and tested (compared the checksum of the generated ROMs we made vs. the ones the other group had made) in 2 days.

Ahhh... The right tools do make one's life easier.

In reply to Re: Rolling into Perl by jordanh
in thread Rolling into Perl by robartes

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