Juerd wrote:

The first perl I used was some version 4. Later, I found out that 5 already existed at that point, which was why many things that I read about did work on my computer, but not on the web server I was using.

Heh. I had that problem with "awk". I had the Aho, Kernighan, Weinberger book on the subject, and I was trying to follow along on a Sun box. It turned out Sun had decided that the latest version of awk was too different from the old one, and had arbitrarily renamed the new one "nawk". There wasn't any way this could be documented in the definitive book about Awk, because it had happened after the fact.

Anyway, my story is that many people were telling me good things about perl for a long time (I have no idea what version of perl this started with, but it was pretty early -- I've got some friends who are serious unix-hipsters). I ignored what I was hearing until perl 5 was almost out for roughly three reasons:

1. I've developed the habit of ignoring hype about the latest and greatest -- when I started in this biz the word was Pascal was going to save the world.
2. I had just bought the aforementioned "Awk" book, and I don't like to move on from a subject until I feel like I've mastered it (this means that I don't move on very often).
3. I'd been suffering with "rn" for a long time as my main newsreader, and I absolutely hated it, and couldn't imagine why I would want to touch something written by that guy Larry Wall.