Just weighing in with another datapoint, I started programming at age 9 (in 1970) when my dad brought home some PDP/8 manuals that a client had given him, including a manual for a clunky language named FOCAL. I read through the PDP/8 books, eagerly staring at the "assembly language", but was particularly fascinated by this "FOCAL" thing, so I actually wrote some FOCAL programs on paper.

Dad saw this fascination with this programming thing, and figured out how to get me access to the high school's ASR-33 on the weekends so I could start programming for real. And after I had written and run my first real program (150 lines, no bugs!), I was hooked. I was going to grow up and be a programmer!

Of course, at the time, programming was used only by banks and government. Little did I know that 10 years later, individuals could afford computers, and 20 years later, I'd be having email conversations with people in Moscow in near real-time and publishing a best-selling book on a fledgling computer language. And 25 years later, I'd be convicted of three felonies for doing my computer job, forever altering my life.

So, I've been programming for 30 years, so at the core, I seem to "be a programmer", but I also play so many roles now, I try not to limit my self-definition that way. If asked on an airplane, I usually say "I'm a travelling stand-up comic", because that's the part of the job that most people can identify the easiest with.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Incredible isn't it? I read the plethora of articles on your conviction and to be honest I can't see that you were guilty of anything other than gross naiveté.

Getting back to the subject in hand, there are different kinds of programmers: To use the metaphor from "Star Bright" (I forget the author, but it is in "Tomorrow's Children" edited by Isaac Himself, who is up in heaven now) there are "brights": People like Larry, Tom and Linus (at the high end) and all good programmers. There are "tweens", people like most of us here at Perlmonks (I count myself towards the lower end of this category) and then there are your everyday people who are aware that there are people who programs for computers but that is all.

We each have our own abilities and focus: I like writing tersely procedural Perl but I am getting better at objects. One of my former co-workers thought in general terms and would then pick which of his many languages to drop the code into - a real 'bright'.

Enjoy your code and be prepared to learn, for there is always something to learn.

Elgon Update: Zigster - every day should be a day of revelation!

I don't think that it's a "single moment of clarity" thing. It's more like a gradual process. When I first started writing Perl, my code looked like C (but that's OK - Larry said so!) These days I'm far more comfortable with Perl idioms, but there was no single point when I suddenly thought "Aha! I'm a Perl programmer now." I can look back on code that I wrote only a few weeks ago and improve it using techniques that I've learnt since then.

I'm gradually becoming a better and better Perl programmer, but there are plenty of people around who are far better than me. I see enough of their code to realise that I've still got a long way to go - and that's part of the fun of Perl!

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me

As long as you can acutally solve the problems you got at hand (say without further constraints like performance or the like) you're doing a good job as a (Perl)programmer. You'll probably get to points when the job has to be done particularly good (e.g. better than the coder before you did ;-) That will be one of the moments you start thinking thru things more precise and maybe find other (better) ways to fulfill a task. That is what programming in C is for me ;-)

Anyway, in Perl I tend to refuse to think about further constraints as long as I get the job done, because at least 95% of the perljobs I do are straight forward and don't care whether they take 5 seconds or 5 minutes...

Regards
Stefan K

$dom = "skamphausen.de";   ##   May The Open Source Be With You!
$Mail = "mail@$dom;  $Url = "http://www.$dom";
[download]

Dont compair yourself to others and see yourself lacking there will always be people more able than yourself. Compair yourself to the you of last month know you are a better person, programmer. Remember that on forums like perlmonks you are talking to the top 10% of the industry so chill. To quote from desiderata:

Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.

--

Zigster

i was actually looking for a some "this is/was my experience..." i realize that comparsion never brings anything but dissillusionment...

but your point is well taken, when dealing with the creme de la creme... =)

magnus

I started with Perl AFTER I graduated with a CS degree. I graduated one year and eight months ago, and I have had three jobs (including my current one) that allowed me to use Perl.

I was first exposed to Perl about 1996, when I was busy learning C++, Unix, and basic OOP stuff. I really wanted to learn Perl at that time - but I was not ready. What I mean is that I could write Perl like a second semester C++ student would attempt, but the serious stuff did not come until after I did it the hard way with other languages.

Now I am trying to piece together all the little puzzle parts that were taught to me in my CS courses. This is something I will (hopefully) never finish, becuase the point of the journey is not to arrive - it's to keep learning. The more languages you understand, the more you understand about the essence of what a language is. In our case, it's just ways of arranging one's and zero's to get little chips to work in harmony with each other.

I read from my Geek books everyday, even if I only have time to look at one page. I go back over the books that I have already read and try to engrave that knowledge permanantly into my head. The doctor says I should be out in a couple of months, but that's another story . . .

So where am I now? Not too much further away from were I was 4 years ago. One day at a time . . . :)

Jeff

R-R-R--R-R-R--R-R-R--R-R-R--R-R-R--
L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--

If you are asking when do you 'become a programmer' is there a moment of clarity and revalation? Dunno aint happened to me yet but I hope it never does. Looking for the revelation is the fun. I would hate to not want to know more stuff. I like learning.
--

Zigster

Although the 80's singer Rick Springfield isn't a Perl programmer, he did once say something that was quite relevant to Perl. After he hit it big he looked back over his 15 years of struggling to get there and advised:

"Never compare yourself to anyone else, because you are your own worst critic, and you will always come up short."

Along the same lines is the Stanislaw Lem short SF story "Tales of Pirx the Pilot" in which Pirx was the pilot everyone compared themselves to.

Can I do something in Perl that Merlyn or Mirod cannot? Not likely, but maybe someday.

I would disagree with the last paragraph. Stuff is only hard when you dont know how to do it. It is one of the great ironies of life. It is always hard to apreciate your own knowledge, well because you know it ;-) . There is no accounting aspects of your knowledge, things you find trivial, that other people will yearn for.
--

Zigster

You know the world is coming to an end when......people are listing Befunge as a language that they know... yikes

Time for you to learn malbolge now :)

japhy wrote:

> When did I realize I had a talent for using Perl? When did I figure out that I knew how to do things
> efficiently? When I looked at my first programs, and shrunk them tremendously.

I think you hit the nail on the head there. I think the best indication of progress for me is when I look back at old programs and see how much I've learned since I wrote them. It feels good to turn 20 or 30 lines of old code into five or so.

I also like seeing remnants of C influence in older code (e.g., using for ($i=0;$i<@arr;$i++) to walk through an array) that I've since replaced with Perl idioms (foreach is my friend).

-sacked

For me, programming perl is not about learning or using perl. Programming perl is a search for the "Ah hah" moment: the moment when everything crystallises and youre brain finally groks an idea. I've been lucky to be introduced to coding as a subset of the whole idea of computers/machines, because I study Electrical Engineering, not CS. I think that it's the moment of realisation that lends coding its appeal, not the particulars of what is being discussed. I get as much enjoyment from doing/studying maths and physics as I do from coding because it's the effect on ME that's important, not the results.

All code becomes superceded and all ideas about how the world works become outdated, but the process of learning is always a joy.

What do you mean "even if"? In my opinion, this is the best Perl job you can have. You're not tied down to building some large web application to someone else's specs, you have freedom to investigate new ideas and ways of doing your job, and the automation you'll get out of it will not only make your job easier, but you'll get it done in half the time that everyone else is.

I made the move from "programming" to "operations/administration" 6 or 8 months ago, and I will never go back.

After a couple of years, I went back to graduate school to persue a Masters degree in a non CS related field. My master's thesis involved analyzing 4.5 data points of time series data. I started anaylzing my thesis data using Mathematica and some programs I had written in Java. While I was in the early stages of the data analysis, I took a long weekend trip to New Orleans to visit a friend who was there on business. Since I knew that I would be spending quite a bit in airports and waiting for my friend to finish up meetings and the like, I borrowed an old laptop running Redhat Linux to work on my thesis. I copied my data to the laptop, but I didn't think to check to see if the it had a java compiler or a JVM installed. While waiting for my flight to New Orleans, I realized that the Redhat installation on the laptop had perl, python, tcl/tk, gcc, and a couple dozen variations of lisp and scheme, but no java compiler or JRE. I either had to find some other way to work or resign myself to hauling an extra 10 pounds of dead weight around the French Quarter. As I mentioned before, I wasn't fond of perl and I hadn't touched C since my undergraduate days, so I started writting some new data anaysis programs in Python. I ran into some problems early in the process and the documentation that I had on the laptop for Python wasn't terribly helpful. At this point I decided to give perl another chance. After writting a couple of "hello, worlds" and looking through the FAQ, I had a working data anaylsis program and my perception of perl had changed a bit -- perl wasn't a bad language, I probably wouldn't use it if I could use java, but it wasn't a bad language. The epiphany came a few days later after a night of too many hurricanes and too much gumbo. I was working on my thesis in Cafe du Monde drinking coffee and eating order after order of those fried, powdered sugar donut like things they sell when it struck me that the best way to describe patterns in my data was to describe them using perl's regular expressions. The text of my thesis is peppered with regular expressions and snippets of perl code. I have graphs where the axes are labeled with regular expressions. Perl is unique in its rich expressiveness. You can see this clearly in the poetry, obfusications, and JAPH signitures. For me perl was not only a better tool than Java or Python to deal with my data, it was a better language than English to describe my data. It was at this point that I became a perl programmer.

----
Coyote

I too wish to step in the footprints of the Perl programmers who can reduce my 50-line "program" to less than 80 chars... and I've tried, but I currently find myself falling down huge holes. It'll take time. Things are sticking. If I could teach myself 6502 assembly without much documentation (or a net.presence in 1987), then I think I stand a good chance of doing something great (or even "mediocre++") in Perl. :o)

--
Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.

I will now reveal the secret to being a Perl programmer.

1. Write code in Perl.
2. Repeat.

1. Write great Perl code.
2. Repeat.