programming for finance burned me out and i was looking for something interesting. it was 1998 and silicon alley was seducing anyone/everyone with pipe dreams of stock options. they had windows... isapi... and vb script... and other tools of mass destruction... but i chanced upon some .asp scripts that had embedded perl. something about the -> operator jumped out at my C++ heritage. and the love afair began.
well, fads come and go. so went the dot coms. and so went i, back to finance.