Re: What was the bait (project, problem or opportunity) that hooked you on Perl?

I was programming on OpenVMS in 1996. I'd done a few data munging tasks, nothing big.

We had this system that mailed a lot of quality reports on chemical samples to a bunch of different people. Maintenance of the mailing lists and the like was a pain and mail servers were sometimes unreliable.

A customer asked if the reports could be put on a website. I thought about it for a few minutes and realized that I could dump the reports into directories, formatted with links for a lot of the interesting information to cross reference them and index pages to bring up various views of interest to various communities. It was just a data reformatting problem, no CGI was required.

It was a huge hit and it took me practically no time to put together.

The fact that Perl was working on OpenVMS was a big part of the win here. Perl is ubiquitous, still. Today, I do Unix and it's installed on every one of our Unix systems by default. That's not true of any other scripting langauge and I don't see that changing.

I wonder if that Perl6 will ever enjoy that kind of penetration, no matter how perfect it is.

Comment on Re: What was the bait (project, problem or opportunity) that hooked you on Perl?

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Re^2: What was the bait (project, problem or opportunity) that hooked you on Perl? by moritz (Cardinal) on Apr 26, 2009 at 08:55 UTC
I wonder if that Perl6 will ever enjoy that kind of penetration, no matter how perfect it is. That will mostly depend on the dedication of those who run these "unsual" operating systems. Currently most people who hack on the compilers and the virtual machines are too absorbed with implementing the language first. Yes, portability is great, but you can't just hope that it will drop out somewhere - you really have to put effort into it.	[reply]

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Re^2: What was the bait (project, problem or opportunity) that hooked you on Perl?
by moritz (Cardinal) on Apr 26, 2009 at 08:55 UTC

I wonder if that Perl6 will ever enjoy that kind of penetration, no matter how perfect it is.

That will mostly depend on the dedication of those who run these "unsual" operating systems. Currently most people who hack on the compilers and the virtual machines are too absorbed with implementing the language first. Yes, portability is great, but you can't just hope that it will drop out somewhere - you really have to put effort into it.

[reply]