in reply to Why did you become a Perl expert (or programmer)?

I was introduced to perl at the 1989 Software Development conference in Oakland, a presentation by Rob Kolstad. Back then I was mostly a C programmer, but also a DBA and sysadmin.

Then I managed to get it installed (no internet, dialup services with shell archives sent via mail robots), and figured that perl was quite like C (from my perspective) without the compilation and memory hassles.

About a year later usersubs were introduced to perl 3, and I figured that linking in the Sybase db-lib functions would be really useful...

Over 30 years later it's still in use in some dark corners :-)

Michael

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Re^2: Why did you become a Perl expert (or programmer)?
by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on Sep 16, 2023 at 11:32 UTC

    I was introduced to perl at the 1989 Software Development conference in Oakland

    Wow, that's early, even before comp.lang.perl was formed! Did you hang out on Usenet back then and remember the (futile) "No Perl please" requests in some of the posts? ... merlyn apparently enjoyed responding to shell/sed/awk Usenet requests with Perl code so much that he formed part of the 2.7% who voted against the formation of a separate comp.lang.perl newsgroup. :)

    See also: How long have you been using Perl? poll by vroom (and TimToady's reply ;-)

[reply]
      Shows my age :-)

      I did hang out on Usenet back then, also on comp.databases and later comp.databases.sybase... all ancient history today!

      Michael

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