Re: How has Perl affected you?

[johngg]

I first came across Perl in a Dr Dobbs article. I was looking after a bunch of Sun workstations and servers at the time and was writing a lot of C-shell scripts for admin tasks. It looked from the article like Perl might be a more powerful tool (this was before it shipped with the o/s) so I installed 4.036 from a Sun User Group CD-ROM and started playing.

My background was as a Fortran/Cobol programmer on ICL 1900 systems who'd moved into a sysadmin role on Perkin-Elmer then Pr1me minis before we got our first SPARCstation 1s, at which point I started dabbling in C. As you might expect, at first I was writing C programs in Perl but as my familiarity with Perl idioms grew I became far more productive and also willing to tackle more complex problems. Perl brought a huge amount of enjoyment into the job, writing code was fun and the ease with which results could be delivered was amazing.

Perl is the only language that has, several times, had me laughing out loud when I discovered how simple a task was that would have taken dozens of lines in another language!

[stevieb]

Perl is the only language that has, several times, had me laughing out loud when I discovered how simple a task was that would have taken dozens of lines in another language!

Conversely, Perl is the only language that has me laughing out loud when I discovered that so many other languages make things so obtuse and difficult relative to Perl ;)