note webfiend <p>That's a tough question for me, because part of the reason I love Perl is all the little things that are waiting to nibble my toes. It's a rich, delightful language, and I miss it every day when I clock in to work on some overbearing Rails project.</p> <p>I think the <em>first</em> playful nip from Perl was when I realized that I didn't need to explicitly specify <code>scalar</code> to get the length of a list - I could just assign the list to a scalar variable. I had already read this in the Camel book, but I stuck with <code>scalar</code> because I didn't trust Perl to do what I meant. I still remember the day the scales fell from my eyes, sitting in front of my Slackware machine with coffee in hand and suddenly seeing <em>context</em> in my Perl app where before I had seen only code.</p> <p>I continued using <code>scalar</code> in production code for a while, mainly because my coworkers and managers didn't really grok context.</p> <p>I've had many nibbles since, but that is the one sticks out in my memory.</p> 826230 826230