pre-Perl

As briefly hinted in Re^2: Roads to Perl, my first programming language has been Pascal, taught at high school -- an experimental course, back then. Later on I felt I had to learn C and C++ too, and I bought Borland's Turbo C++ for DOS, which was the cheapest one available, that I knew of... but then for over a decade I abandoned it completely. When I came to Linux I started giving a peek into it again, but couldn't really get the hang of it.

In those early days, surprising as it may be, the language in which I was regularly programming in was the RPN based one of my HP-28s pocket calculator. And I must say, in full earnestness, that I was quite proficient with it. I still like it, although I only use it sporadically now and I'm not that skilled anymore.

Then I had my unpleasant encounter with BASIC, also described in Re^2: Roads to Perl. Nothing else to say about this...

I also learnt some markup languages, although these probably won't count in this list for many of you! Most notably, LaTeX, and I think that - also thanks to te kind contributors of ctt - I never got those bad habits so many of which are so widespread in that area. I must admit though, that while on the one hand I can write decent, well-structured documents and I'm aware of many useful packages, on the other one I haven't the slightest of the required skills to do anything really "advanced" with the underlying TeX engine.

After having come to Linux, "of course", I couldn't help learning some shell scripting, and I know it not that bad, but I'm sure there could be a lot to learn about it. But who cares? Now I use Perl to accomplish any task that at fisrt sight is not suitable for the shell... and also many that could be suitable for it!!

Perl

The story of how I actually entered in contact with Perl is described here: My first approach to Perl. How has been yours?, at which node I started a thread that happens to be fundamentally a duplicate of this one, which I hadn't noticed...

In reply to Re: Roads to Perl by blazar
in thread Roads to Perl by gunzip

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.