I've only been doing Perl for about ten years. Four as a SA, building quick scripts to get us out of jams, and the last six+ as a Perl Developer writing production code for various non-CGI applications.

I came in (thank all the Gods) at the back end of the Perl4 era; my first real Perl Coding assignment was to figure out if a Perl5 rewrite of a Perl4 system was behaving in the same way when handed a particularly nasty edge-case. A quick and somewhat painful introduction to Perl 4's Module and O-O structure ensued; followed immediate by a crash course (aided by Damian's Book) on how Perl5 OO should be handled.

Since then, it has been all Fun'n'Games.

You overlooked Perl released on this day in 1987 which appeared in this place an hour before your post.

Cheers, Sören

From looking at my old files (am I a packrat?) it appears that I learned perl on December 22, 1994. My first program was a log file analyzer for our web server. In August of 1994 I visited just about every web site that I could access. The best search engine for this task back then was called 'A Ton of Web Sites' and was a nearly comprehensive linear list of every web server that could be found.

I have used Perl ever since, and I've attended most of the Perl Conferences (now called OSCON).

My first widely-used CGI-type program was from 1995. It used MAILTO and procmail instead of GET or POST. This allowed reliable form submission even if the web server was down, which was not so uncommon back then. This system tracked hardware modifications in our prototypes. Users would submit forms through a MAILTO link. Mailing the form entries would cause procmail to run a perl program that then edited the HTML files, making the site dynamic. This system ran for years without a hitch, and I think some form of it may still be in use.

I think that I had learned perl3 and used it once some years before then, but had forgotten it.

I first admired perl in this usenet posting to comp.sources.games, which included both the C versions and perl versions of a program to compute pi. Here is the perl version: