Long before my epiphany with vim I'd been using Dreamweaver for HTML authoring and digging further into it's capabilities I came across its regular expression features within Find & Replace. There was a note in "Dreamweaver Bible" referring to "Mastering Regular Expressions" which I found in a local library and from there I realised Perl was the languaged to learn if you wanted access to the full power of regexes. I next read the first 2/3 of "Programming Perl" while also trying to learn Java. By day I wrestled with Java OO and by night I relaxed with Larry Wall's entertaining tome. I only had space in my life for one "real" programming language so Perl won.