I hated Perl.

HATED it.

Here I was, a University student toiling away at my summer job. I'd started programming in higschool in Turing, moved onto Turbo Pascal and VB. In Uni I'd moved onto C and the monolith that is Java.

Then I had to run these "Perl" scripts for this job. I thought it was ugly and horrid and the first Perl I saw had been written by an executive who had been an English major of all things (they were elegant, long and devoid of logic).

Then, while clutching my borrowed and dog-eared Camel book, I tried something; a minor to fix a recurring problem that resulted in hours of painstaking data examination.

Hey. That worked. I just saved hours of work.

I tried another.

Hey... that worked too.

I tried more and more things and had instant feedback and I realized, "Hey, I could do that Java AVL Tree project from last term in fraction of the time."

So I continued on the path of "just try it". I've tried it in other languages but I return to my love of Perl each time.

And so when asked about this weird Perl thing by friends who did ASP or PHP or ColdFusion, I told them to give it a whirl. While I haven't converted many, all have been stunned at the instant feedback you can get by just doing it.

I'm embarrassed by those first programs... but I still love to try.

--
meraxes

In reply to Re: Musing on Perl's "Just Try It" Amazingness by meraxes
in thread Musing on Perl's "Just Try It" Amazingness by ack

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