I was doing some technically driven customer service stuff at what was at the time the hottest Internet company in the world. I saw another employee heaped with accolades on the basis of things achieved with Perl. I had been a 10 year old hacker who did a bit of programming in high school but drifted away because PASCAL and friends just weren't interesting to me. So I thought, I'll see about this Perl stuff.

Two excruciating weeks—of reading the first three chapters of the Llama over and over—later I had finished my first "production" script; a shipping calculator. It was finished the night before the shipping prices were to change. It went into use the next morning because it was drastically needed and as big as the company was it was still in start-up mode so some dummy from customer service could sneak a script into use for 200+ employees.

I was, strangely enough, thinking about it yesterday. It was something like 50 hours (it was two weeks of time after completing a 10-12 hour work day) of exhaustion. It was perfectly functional but much more verbose than it needed to be (lots of flat arrays where something like a hash of hashes of arrays was really wanted). All that crazy effort and lost sleep. I could probably rewrite it now in 30 minutes.

But this is exactly what I love about Perl and why I've only had one job in the last 10 years which was not mainly Perl work. A novice without the benefit of perldoc or man or any help other than a book which took it for granted that I understood what was going on half the time since it was exactly the same as in POSIX and sed and…

Perl is both simple and terribly difficult. It's rigorous or absurdly loose. It's sleek and clean or unrecognizably dirty. A functionally identical program can be written by a solid Perl hacker in 30 minutes and 20 lines or by a beginner in two weeks and 200 lines.

I left off study of computers and biology and any number of other things like linguistic and astrophysics for writing and art. When I discovered Perl I knew I'd found a bridge between the worlds of my chronic dilettantism. I regularly feel gratitude to the great folks who work on the core, the CPAN, and this terrific site. :)

In reply to Re: What was the bait (project, problem or opportunity) that hooked you on Perl? by Your Mother
in thread What was the bait (project, problem or opportunity) that hooked you on Perl? by generator

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