I started programming with QBasic that was shipped with Windows 3.11. After some time I came up with some code to read a file, and do a basic substitution encryption.

It was three pages on the 80x25 screen, and I was proud. So I showed it to a friend, and he told me that it could be done in one line of Perl. I didn't believe him, but he showed me that it works (I don't remember what it was, but know I think it must have been perl -pe '$_=lc;tr/a..z/thekyhr.../' or so).

I tried a few other languages, notably Pascal, C and Eiffel, and I always found string processing to be too cumbersome. Now and then I remembered about that magic Perl thing that did complete programs in one line, and I decided to learn it. So I bought a (really crappy) book and started to program.

It has since then spoiled me, and I've found no other programming language that I liked better.

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

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