My perl immersion began by working on someone else's perl code in 1995; the job was to condition newswire text for "spoken language modeling", which means: convert all number strings, abbreviations and symbols into the fully spelled-out words that people would say if they were reading the text aloud (and there was an option to spell out the appropriate pronunciation for punctuation marks -- e.g. "open-single-quote ... close-single-quote").

I needed to adapt the code so it would work on a wider variety of input text data (a lot of hand-tuning involved). Luckily for me, the author of the 8-or-so interrelated Perl-4 scripts I was given really knew what he was doing. I spent most of the first week or two referring constantly to the "perlfunc" and "perlvar" man pages to figure out how the code worked. I already knew regexes from grep and awk and some sed usage, but the "perlre" man page was like a full course of steroids.

Between the vast array of built-in functions, the many enhancements to basic regex usage, the kitchen-sink/use-whatever-works-best mindset, and the fully-detailed-yet-coherent man pages, everything just made sense. (Update: well, everything except "pack" and "unpack" -- I didn't really grasp the man page for that until much later.)

I started writing perl substitutes for (combinations of) basic shell tools because it was quicker/easier/more effective than repeatedly doing lengthy pipeline commands or adding more shell-based functions and aliases in my .bashrc file (I had always been averse to shell scripting). I was deeply grateful to be able to do more of the complex tasks with less dependence on C, and I stopped using awk altogether.

In reply to Re: What was the bait (project, problem or opportunity) that hooked you on Perl? by graff
in thread What was the bait (project, problem or opportunity) that hooked you on Perl? by generator

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