A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, I used to code in C. It's been over a decade, so I don't remember much of it, but I do remember how incredibly astounded I was that a simple routine that took me a week to code in 8088 assembler (am I dating myself, or what?), would only take a couple of hours in C, yet have almost the same speed.

Fast forward 14 years: I program in Perl and I have started dabbling in C++. I know that I need more on my resumé than just Perl, mainframe experience and VBA, but I am having trouble getting excited about C++. I look at the hoops I have to jump through for even the simplest of string manipulations and I writhe in agony (anyone know of a C++ regex library?).

Perl is wonderful because I can get stuff done fast. Sure, we all love the language, but if we couldn't do anything with it, we wouldn't care.

Cheers,
Ovid

Update: My view of a potential job interview.

Me:Well, I once created a mainframe test region using VBA.

Potential employer: And this is relevant how?

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In reply to (Ovid) RE: Late night revelation of PERL by Ovid
in thread Late night revelation of PERL by Macphisto

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