That is exactly what I felt when I discovered Perl. I was looking for something I could work on both at home (on my Macs) and at work (on Windows). There were several alternatives, and I had already done a project with PHP.

Perl just changed everything. I love languages. Because I was born in the country with the most number of languages in the world, because my dad was very good at 3 different languages, and because all of grow up knowing at least two languages, languages always fascinated me.

Perl, primarily because of Larry's background as a linguist, seems to attract people who love the language for it being a language. A language has culture, and that is what Perl has.

A couple of years ago I got lucky and attended OSCON in Portland. I met the man, and even got a photo taken with him. I got a chance to say a few words, and I said exactly, "I love Perl not because it gets the job done. I guess most any language nowadays will get the job done. I love it because it is fun. Thanks for making Perl fun."

I remember the contrast between Guido Van Rossum's state of Python address and Larry's rambling, free for all state of the onion. The former was angsting over why or why not to provide IF... THEN... ELSE in Python while the latter spent the time regaling everyone with all manner of funky observations of various slices of life including BrainFsck. It was obvious which language was more fun.

Ahhh... Perl, how I enjoy writing in thee.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.