Re: How has Perl affected you?

Despite taking several programming courses in high school and undergrad, I was never able to fully grasp the concept of programming. Sure, I understood many of the more basic concepts, but being able to sit down and write something that did more than print out some text or take in input from the user.

During my last semester of undergrad, I had to complete a senior project which covered all of the concepts of my major, one of which was programming. Fortunately, we were able to use any language, as long as it met the requirements for the project. After stumbling across Perl, I decided to give it a try. The first book I bought was Perl Scripting for Windows Security but quickly realized that while it aligned perfectly with my project, it was too advanced based off of my level of experience. Then I bought Beginning Perl, and immediately it started to click. I eventually moved on to writing more advanced code, more advanced for me at least, and was able to utilize Perl in my career as a security engineer, writing scripts to automate some of the testing procedures that my team used on a regular basis. This ultimately led to the team improving our productivity since we no longer had to babysit our tools. As I was the only person on the team the knew Perl, I became the go to person if someone wanted to know if/how to do something using Perl. This is something that to this day, about five years later, my former coworkers have discussed with me on occasion.

Unfortunately, due to a change in positions, and a need to work with Python, I haven't been able to work with Perl in several years. I will still pull out old code and made adjustments based off of things I've learned. I've found the resources and openness of other members in the community to be a valuable resource along the way.

Comment on Re: How has Perl affected you?

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Re^2: How has Perl affected you? by stevieb (Canon) on Aug 15, 2017 at 22:23 UTC
Thanks rspishock, I too left a job (a 10 year job that had me dabbling with Perl) quite a few years ago. I promptly left the language, but a couple of years later came back to it despite it not being required. Step forward more years, and now I do Python coding as about 30% of my job. I stuck with Perl though, particularly because I like the people in the community, and the feedback I get on the code I write (as is the Perl way, I can tend to be lazy, so I utilize Perl experts to help me with code in other languages that might even just barely relate to Perl ;) Now, I have absolutely no professional ties to Perl in any which way, but I do maintain a decent list of CPAN distributions while patching others, solely so I can remain knowledgeable enough to hang around here while providing something back to the community that imho got my career started (even though I'm literally not a programmer by trade). I've learned recently that there are others like you and I that are 'out of the game' but are still hanging around, and that gives me a pleasant feeling.	[reply]

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Re^2: How has Perl affected you?
by stevieb (Canon) on Aug 15, 2017 at 22:23 UTC

Thanks rspishock,

I too left a job (a 10 year job that had me dabbling with Perl) quite a few years ago. I promptly left the language, but a couple of years later came back to it despite it not being required.

Step forward more years, and now I do Python coding as about 30% of my job. I stuck with Perl though, particularly because I like the people in the community, and the feedback I get on the code I write (as is the Perl way, I can tend to be lazy, so I utilize Perl experts to help me with code in other languages that might even just barely relate to Perl ;)

Now, I have absolutely no professional ties to Perl in any which way, but I do maintain a decent list of CPAN distributions while patching others, solely so I can remain knowledgeable enough to hang around here while providing something back to the community that imho got my career started (even though I'm literally not a programmer by trade).

I've learned recently that there are others like you and I that are 'out of the game' but are still hanging around, and that gives me a pleasant feeling.

[reply]