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My first introduction to Perl was from reading the Free Compilers and Interpreters List and the Language List. I am always looking for interesting languages. I saw some Perl on Usenet and decided to stick to Rexx for the time. This was when I was still in high school and computers were just a hobby and I was going to be a linguist or in the diplomatic corps because I loved natural languages.

Fast forward to college, after I'd had trainging in multiple forms of Basic and two forms of Pascal, RPG/400, and COBOL in high school and actually went to my Ada class a bit in college, being by that time a computer science and philosophy dual major. I edited a few lines (about four) of Perl for a friend with lots of help from the docs. At this time, my favorite language was RedCode. My favorites for doing anything useful were x86 assembly and Rexx. I used a little QuickBasic and CA-Realizer when I was forced to work on Windows.

Fast forward again to after I'd had mono, dropped out sick, gone back, and dropped out from a relapse, took lots of bedrest, then worked crappy non-computer jobs for a while to keep myself from being idle while I got my health back up. I was playing with computers mostly as a hobby again, and I was programming things for role-playing purposes, making my own command-line utils, patching various things in minor ways, writing text adventures for DOS and Linux, and messing with stuff for my friend's DOS dial-in BBS. I was using the Net but I wasn't writing anything for it yet nor was I working in the field yet. I was getting primed and ready.

About a month after being hired as entry-level telephone tech support at a local ISP, my boss found out I knew something about programming. I hadn't touched anything but those four lines of Perl in all my life. I was given code that ran on one file, producing summary information, and told to modify it. It was written in Perl, and the modifications existed of a number of things. First was making the program run automatically on several files in several directories in a common directory subtree. Second was adding additional summary information to the report, which required new calculations be done. Third was to make the reports summarize the data across all of the files. Fourth was to make the program automatically rotate the logs and the summary data. Fifth was to make the program run faster than the original. Sixth was to add a debugging mode so we could check on the processing from time to time to make sur eI hadn't introduced any problem code. I was given the task on Friday afternoon, and I was handed the Llama and the Camel. I was to have everything done by the following Wednesday and fully tested and in production by the following Friday. I ended up with about 70% of the code being my own, and I got it done in slightly less than the time allotted thanks mostly to the Camel, the Llama, and the standard docs. Two years later, I wrote the same thing from scratch for another company in 1/3 the code from memory.

When I really started learning the finer points of the language, it was because I was a regular on comp.lang.perl.misc and because I was graced with the responses and sometimes even personal email of people like merlyn, Abigail, nobull, and a host of others who so selflessly took the time to help. I think is was japhy who convinced me, when I was spending hours a day reading that group, to try this site. I liked it so much that this is where I spend most of my technical community time these days. I have kept learning things here, too. Hopefully along the way I've helped almost as many people as have helped me.

In reply to Re: How did you learn Perl? by mr_mischief
in thread How did you learn Perl? by venimfrogtongue

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