First introduction to Perl was in college. For a group project in a UI class the task was to create a nice interface to some C programs used for BLAST gene stuff (have no idea what the programs do, it's been many moons since then). The UI was to be web based, and Perl was the glue. Long story short, the C programs were compiled on a Solaris machine, and transparently (to us) copied to a RedHat web server. So I spent a long tme trying to debug the IPC::Open module in Perl, when it wasn't a Perl problem at all. It left a bad taste in my mouth, so I didn't touch Perl for a while.

Second exposure was a few years ago in a professional setting. Someone had a script to run a suite of tests (about 700 tests in all) distributed across four machines. The author was assigned to a different project, and I inherited the script. Re-read the Llama book, then much of the Camel book, then started visiting here. Perl is now my most often-used language (even though Perl is not part of my job decription).