I came into Perl in quite a non-linear way. At the beginning I knew a bit of C and unix shells, and I came into Perl I don't know how exactly. It was pretty much love at first sight, but at this time I had no computer so I could only learn by reading documentation. Still, I was fascinated enough that I printed the whole perldoc and started reading it, like one reads a novel. I did that during my sparetime, for unfortunately nobody cared about Perl in the university I was attended.

When I found my first job, it was even worse. I had to work on MS/Windows, with Visual Basic and other crap. During years, I pretty much had to forget about Perl. My home computer usage was not intensive enough for me to use anything but shell or sometimes C/C++. I also learned a few other languages, but not very thoroughly: mainly because I was curious about programming languages. During this time I learned a bit about Python, for instance.

Few years ago, I resigned of my job and started to do whatever I wanted to do. Not just programming. Plenty of stuff. Yet at some point I got involved in a big programming project (let's call it X) in C++. I realized I sucked at C++ and I wanted to do X-related things in other languages. Yet I didn't want to learn more about C++. I don't like this complicated language.

So first I wrote some bash code, still related to X. I learned a lot about bash, but soon I realized bash was too limited for X. Then I tried a bit of Python. But to me Python is terribly boring. You can't do anything without resorting to importing a library, reading the library documentation, which is always used with the same boring object syntax.

And then I remembered about Perl. Started to read the perldoc again. I totally remembered how awesome it was for me years ago. I wrote quite a lot of X-related code in Perl.

And then I learnt about Perl 6. I've been spending lots of time in learning it ever since because this language is just fascinating.

Nowadays, Perl is still a hobby for me but I give it quite a lot of time. I mainly contribute to RosettaCode and I follow the Rosalind bioinformatics course, which I try to solve in Perl 6

And from time to time, I also hang out on perlmonks.org :)