No, I'm not reclaiming it from another language that has stolen it's fire. I'm simply reclaiming it for myself. My work has taken a Windows oriented VB.NET turn in the last year and my Perl knowledge has gone by the wayside, unfortunately. It's gotten to the point where I look at Perl code and it's much like the garbled mess I saw when introduced to regular expressions.

Naturally, this disturbs me greatly. While I was never a great Perl coder (and am hard-pressed even to say I was a good one), I have a great love of the language. Unfortunately, as of late, I haven't wanted to look at any code when I'm not at work. I think my mind is working like:

(work = code)
(home = sleep)
(home + code = SEGMENT_FAULT)

So, I've decided to start up a small project to reclaim my sense of Perl. It's a text editor. A SIMPLE text editor. Kind of like Notepad. Nothing big. Just enough to get me back into it. And I doubt any of you will ever see it. That's not the point. The point is getting my head back around Perl. The reasons I chose a text editor:

1) Re-orienting myself with regular expressions, and find/replace/trim trailing spaces/etc are perfect things to get me back into it.

2) GUI programming. I've never done GUI programming in Perl, and I'd like to play with the simpler GUI features to get a feel for them.

3) To get it back.

Not in any specific order. I'm all for "using the right tool for the job" which I constantly tell other programmers when they need advice, and personally, I would use C with Perl or Python bindings if the goal were to make a really cool text editor. But the "job" that I have to do right now isn't the text editor. It's getting back a piece of the Perl I've been missing for so long. And like any foreign language that you learn, it's getting rustier with disuse by the moment.

So, why am I posting this on Meditations when I'm a lurker by nature and usually only post a random comment here or there? Well, I want to know if any of you have been in the same boat. Has work, time, life, etc kept you away from Perl? How did you get back to it? Are you trying to get back or are you wondering what you were thinking and running far, far away? I want us to think about what we've gained and (in my case) lost in terms of Perl.

I want to hear success stories, failures, and valiant attempts to keep Perl near us. Of course, if Perl never left your life, then you can count yourself lucky and comment or fear the day when it wanders out of your life and you feel like starting a simple project or making a topic like this.

In reply to Reclaiming Perl by iamnothing

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