Well, I want to know if any of you have been in the same boat. Has work, time, life, etc kept you away from Perl? How did you get back to it? Are you trying to get back or are you wondering what you were thinking and running far, far away?

What kept me away? Two rather heavy project courses. Last term, I wrote a compiler front-end pretty much from scratch (while taking four other courses). I didn't really want to do much hacking when I came home from twelve-hour days in the lab alternately debugging a bison grammar written by someone else and fiddling with FFT code whose output didn't quite fit with the textbook's dictum.

How did I get back into it? A couple things. First, I have a fair bit of Perl code hanging about, doing various behind-the-scenes but important things on the server I'm adminning. When I realized that this term gave me more free time than last term did, I decided to start putting more time into maintenance, and start chipping away at my to-implement feature list. Second, a friend asked me to serve as local Perl guru for a project he's embarking on. That got me back into reading my (and his) Perl, but didn't quite get me back up to the point I was at a year or so ago, when I was hacking Perl full-time.

What to do?

Come right on back to Perl Monks. In the past week or so, I've been exposed to other people's problems, solutions, comments, ideas, and opinions. It's a wonderfully mind-broadening experience.

Now if only I could find the same push to get back into Lisp hacking....

--
F o x t r o t U n i f o r m
Found a typo in this node? /msg me
The hell with paco, vote for Erudil!