Re: I first became interested in Perl because...

Back in '94 or '95, I was contracting at a well-known American space agency which shall remain nameless and was told "Fred(*) is leaving, take over his project." It was all in Perl, and it looked similar enough to shell/sed/awk/C that I could pick up a lot of it quickly, and what the hell, it looked a lot more fun than the C++/X-Windows/Motif projects that I still had to do.

(*) The guy's real name wasn't Fred; I just said that to protect his identity. Actually, his name was Rita, but that's another story.

--
tbone1, YAPS (Yet Another Perl Schlub)
And remember, if he succeeds, so what.
- Chick McGee

Comment on Re: I first became interested in Perl because...

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Re^2: I first became interested in Perl because... by jhourcle (Prior) on Jul 24, 2006 at 13:18 UTC
I was surprised that 'I got handed someone else's work' wasn't an option in the poll. In my case, it was 1996, at a university, and we had a 3 person 'web development group' (I did graphics and design work), and the one programmer in our department graduated and got a better job offer -- so Dave and I got all of Tim's work. (Mind you, Dave was a liberal arts major, Tim had been Comp Sci, and I at least had a little bit of programming experience as a kid and some Fortran in my engineering degree.) -- So, I got the work. And when we tried to hire a replacement programmer for our manager, our director decided differently, so I had to maintain all of Tim's work, and write new things as the need arose. (mostly text processing work to convert various text formatting languages to HTML, and a bunch of HTML forms)	[reply]
Re^3: I first became interested in Perl because... by Voronich (Hermit) on Jul 28, 2006 at 18:56 UTC
Yep. That's part of what happened with me. I had a legacy script tossed at me with a "you're smart, fix this." After I fixed it and created a couple of my own the bang for the buck became quickly obvious. I still have not found any language where I can get so much done with so little so quickly.	[reply]