I started adulthood as a teacher of Math at a small college. I had done some programming in college, even working for the college writing database programs for the registrar's office. Our classroom language was Pascal, but we also taught ourselves C. Macro-11 helped with pointer understanding.

When my Math department would not slow down to a reasonable load, I started thinking of a career switch. Knowing that Pascal was out, I bought a book on C++ and the Camel.

The C++ book presented a language with a fortress mentality where I would have to be ever on gaurd against the other programmers who were practically trying to subvert and ruin my work.

From the preface of the Camel, I fell for Perl. Larry was so sure I was going to be able to use his language well, though of course he couldn't be proud of everything I've tried to do with it. He urged me to think of fellow programmers as allies, not enemies. He promised not to laugh at my code, at least not more than he'd laugh at a child learning a language. Well you've read the rest.

Hertz Rent-A-Car hired me to answer Unix trouble calls. Then they asked me to write some Perl code. Eventually, they decided I wasn't an admin (rather obvious actually) and moved me to an application development group as a Java programmer (they still don't think Perl is a real application language, only COBOL and Java are).

Consultants came to teach the ways of Java. They liked to factor everything down to tiny methods spread over dozens of classes. Thankfully I was working on other things, like configuring rt.

My wife graduated and did a postdoc in Johannesburg. That ended. jobs.perl.org listed an opening at a cable company as a Perl/mod_perl Guru. I like that, but the actual title turned out to be Programmer, just as well. Now I write LAMP apps (where m is mod_perl and p is postgres).

Phil