Working on a branch automation project at a bank I was analysing log files and sniffer traces. Awk was what I knew and used. My contemporaries were importing into spreadsheets and bogging down. A consultant was advising we contract with him to put it into a database and develop reports. I was at least able to get some useful data extracted.

We had a problem to solve. The developers asserted the network performance was killing their application. The network guys (which included me) asserted the development team was doing some fundamentally flawed things.

Since awk did not have an internal sort I was sending the data to the system - MS DOS in this case - to sort the data. The volume of data was greater than the available RAM and the DOS sort needed to stuff everything into memory.

I'd heard of Perl and had be vowing to learn it. My copy of Progamming Perl was woefully underused. Checking it I did see that Perl had its own sort. A quick test program showed that Perl could and would sort my data set.

I applied Perl to the problem at hand. Spent one weekend with Learning Perl dutifully doing every exercise. Applied Perl to every problem I could figure out how to address in the language. Didn't look back.

As to the developers vs. network guys battle … I showed that, among other things, the developer's programs were opening, reading and closing the same file 4.77 times a second for the entire duration of the run. Made the spiffy new 486s crawl like an original XT.