Who's still around?

[stevieb]

In 1998, a friend gave me a computer. It was in pieces. I knew nothing about nothing. Within a year, I was communicating over dual telephone lines. Within two years of that, I was a sysadmin at an ISP. This was the year I found Perlmonks. I read a book, 'Perl in 21 days' or some such, and found Perl was what I wanted... a way to automate processes.

Within months, I learned a dangerous amount about MySQL, CGI and Perl to allow any invader to break everything. Thankfully, during that time, everyone was out for themselves, and exploitation hadn't yet become a thing.

By 2009, I'd grown a lot in many areas. No where near perfect in the security arena, but I was becoming proficient on how to interact with the open source world, and how to interact with the CPAN. It was this year that I joined Perlmonks as a member, and became a vocal person, not just a listener.

Now, as some of the old timers will attest to, I always claimed "I'm not a programmer". With that said, I have done much work in fields so closely related to programming, that I have to bend and say that yeah, maybe I can classify as a hacker.

Anyone else around who have claimed "I'm not a programmer", or who has been around since the very early days of Perlmonks who would just like to say "I'm still here!!!"?.

-stevieb

[talexb]

Still here -- I arrived after reading an interview with Damian Conway on a pair.com newsletter (my web provider) who recommended Perlmonks as a very handy on-line user community. Since I'd been part of a community on CompuServe (the OS/2 forums and the Canopus forum, led by Will Zachmann), I knew that an on-line community was a great way to stay up to date on stuff, and get questions answered. That was over twenty years ago.

I did take Engineering at Waterloo, but the only two programming courses were back in first year Math, when I studied FORTRAN and COBOL. Apart from a few goofy things in BASIC back in high school, the real programming experience I got was on the job at AES Data, writing assembler for a word-processing product. This company partnered with Lanier in the States, but the arrival of the IBM PC in late 1981 destroyed the market for 'just word processing'. My fourth year included a course where I had to complete one assignment in Pascal, so .. I more or less learned that (simple, if you know BASIC and FORTRAN) for the assignment. Then my fourth year thesis was to write a C program .. so bought a copy of K&R in '81 and learned that (simple, once you know a few languages -- and assembler).

Eventually my work experience (C, 6809, 68000 and x86 assembler, and Pascal) led me to writing a lot of one-off programs in C .. which led to awk, and then this weird language called Perl. And that led to the Toronto Perl Mongers, and YAPC, and then here. The language is pretty cool, and the community is weird, diverse and brilliant. I'm not crazy about traveling to conferences, but getting to hang out with all these super bright folks is a wonderful experience.

PS I signed up for a CPAN userid about 20 years ago, and I'm still waiting to upload my first distribution. I'll feel I've truly arrived when I finally cross that item off my list.

[stevieb]

This is probably the most detailed response I've read, and to be honest, the most personal.

You see, I'm from Toronto.

Your posts for years that I've followed have been to the point, logical, correct and sensible. I respect you wholeheartedly.

I travel back to Toronto to see Mom a few times per year, so I'd love it if you'd reach out so this hardware/software hacker could meet another one, in person, for real.

As far as your first distribution to the CPAN, I went through that fear. Honest to goodness... I would love to chat with you about that. Get ahold of me via easy to find channels and we'll talk on the phone.

-spek

[Corion]

I'm still here.

I have somewhat the opposite story to tell: By (formal) education, I'm a mathematician and programmer, but after 20+ years in the finance industry, I might still not be a banker but I'm quite good at faking it.

[stevieb]

I dropped out of high school. I never did post secondary. I spent time in places that would be negatively regarded.

But here I am, with you fine people. I've asked questions about math, you've answered them. I've asked questions about nonsense, you've answered them. I've asked complex questions about how do I do X when Y doesn't make sense, and you answered them.

Funny you say you may not be a banker. I said for two decades that I'm not a programmer. That said, this non-programmer figured out some stuff about finance to get by... did you, as a non banker figure out some programming to get by?

Corion, you've been instrumental in many aspects of my growth. I want to say multiple people's growth, but I can't speak for them. The work you've done across the board is beyond comprehension for most people, including myself.

Thank you. Please keep doing what you do, and ensure those you're teaching receive the ethical and moral qualities that I fully believe you have.

-stevieb

[choroba]

I definitely don't qualify as an "old-timer", having joined PM in 2010 (but I had used Perl since 5.6 which was in 2000 and had been following PM in a read-only mode for some time).

I started programming in Basic and Assembler on a Commodore 116 when I was about 13, then discovered Borland Pascal on my father's PC XT. I didn't study programming, though, I graduated in logic and mathematical linguistics (close enough?). Spent 11 years in corporations and startups before returning to academia. Perl still pays my bills.

[stevieb]

Meh, you're an old-timer in my books.

You portray a strong affinity to the Perl language in every place I run into you. I used to say "I'm not a programmer". Your claim "I'm not an old-timer" is kind of the same. You're a resilient, dedicated and honourable educator of the language, and have been for many years.

Classify yourself as a "young-timer" if that makes you feel better.

Keep up your awesome work choroba.

- stevieb

[Happy-the-monk]

"I'm still here!"

I'm still here!

Met a young American lady in my youth, and we found we'd had endlessly more to tell each other and the need to bounce off our thoughts off each other, than with any of the other people we'd met.

Finding the big pond most of the time being between us, with postal services reliably taking many weeks and a phone call reliably taking a week's wages, we discovered early computer networks. I had to learn to type fast, and find ways to get on those computer networks.

Being barred from the networked computer pools of power I started chatting up people who weren't, and discussing this and that, tailgated them in. Had them show me their motions, the fun gimmicks, and the bureaucracy. Weeks later, I had my own ID and logins to get me through, all on my own. In the meantime, with the help of a hacker friend, I fought 99b, SLS and later slackware to get a newly bought 386 box to dial-up the net. Months later I got my very own ID and logins with my real name on, as well.

Disk quotas, dead mailboxes, inactive user accounts, user profiles. Necessity made me what used to be called a hacker even before I found out there were other uses for grep, awk and diverse shells and shell tools than simply getting things to work, make them repeatable and reliable and ok-ish.

And then I got offered jobs, learned about databases and all the icky stuff other people did not want to meddle with. Again I got offered a job, and another job now teaching computer networks, and another teaching computer/network/communications security, and another, and another..., and finally, was asked to do things all over again. This time using Perl. That got me another job, and another job, and I discovered this site: I have been lingering on.

(eta: ...and then Perl Conferences came my way, and then I co-founded a Perl Mongers group ...or two, still going strong.)

Updated to shorten some of the run-off longish sentences.

Cheers, Sören

[jdporter]

I just want to say, on behalf of all of us old-timers, I'm glad that you're still around, and that PerlMonks (like Perl) is still relevant.

[stevieb]

Sir, to me, you are a legend. Although I will respond to each and every post that is responded to this thread, yours is one where I feel undoubtably that you've made such a contribution to Perl and this site that words can't describe.

The years I know you've put in. The work that I know you've sustained. The effort you consistently put forth is beyond any recognition that I as a single person could appreciate properly. Thank you jdporter for your many years of service to maintaining our language and our place to discuss it.

[jdporter]

You are far too kind. But I am grateful for the kudos. :-)

[herveus]

Howdy!

I've been here since 2001. I was heavy into Perl then and continue to do significant work in it for mostly hobby purposes. I'm still watching pretty much daily.

[stevieb]

Please keep doing so daily.

I would love to hear about your hobbies! It's really nice to hear that people still have hobbies in Perl. Honestly... I mostly get put down for my Perl hobbies, even though I write wrappers that are current for today's standards... NHL, Tesla, Raspberry Pi, whatever. Fuck anyone who says Perl is dead... they say that, and I write software to say :P

[herveus]

Howdy!

I have several distinct hobbies that I use Perl to support.

I'm a tablet weaver, and I cooked up Weaving::Tablet for pattern drafting. Lately I've added (but not published) scripts that render patterns in SVG to get them into print form.

I also maintain an heraldic database in the SCA (Morsulus Herald, if that means anything), and the codebase I inherited was in Perl and large parts of it remain intact 25 years later. It's clear that it was originally written in Perl 4. I've modernized what I needed to and written more code for my purposes and moved the database into a SQLite database.

[eyepopslikeamosquito]

Still here.

Started out with shell and awk in the 1990s for all those little glue tasks*. Though I loved both these tools, it gradually dawned on me that Perl was better.

Yet it's the fun side of both Perl and Perl Monks culture, especially compared to Python and Stack Overflow culture, that keeps me coming back here, year after year.

I'm also fascinated by the long and quirky history of the Perl Monks web site, and take special pleasure in the freedom of not having to stay on topic, and in the teasing of other regulars (such as the Bod), as indicated below.

Fun References

• Chickens References - provoked by Bod and harangzsolt33 (couldn't resist :-)
• Elvis Lives References
• Experience Point References and Pranks
• Fun References

Some Quirky Perl Monks History References

• paco References
• Let's make BBQ a Saint!

See Also

• Perl Monks Culture References
• Re: Organizational Culture (Part II): Meta Process (Perl Timeline) - mentions London.pm quirky sense of humour, e.g. London.pm declares war on Paris.pm and London.pm sponsoring a camel at London Zoo

* update: while I enjoyed hacking out little helper Unix shell and awk scripts, most of my large-scale coding back then was done in FORTRAN, Simula, C, C++, Cobol, Pascal and 4GLs, as described in more detail here. further update: before joining Perl Monks, I hung out on the fun with perl and perl golf mailing lists, and even the London.pm mailing list from Sydney (like DHA from New York), so I guess I've always been attracted to the fun side of Perl culture, further indicated by The Lighter Side of Perl Culture series and Golfing References.

[Discipulus]

I'm still ..somewhere!!!

Hello stevieb it is interesting because you already started meditations like this one and this is one of the reason I'm still here in some way.

I find this community very real in the sense we have history: is not something ephemeral like get in, ask, grab and disappear unpersonal, anonymous and, let me say, squalid and sad internet place.

Also pretending to appear like a monastery brings implicitly and effectively something more: the independence of a monastic order like it used (and still use) to be, the proudness of a Frei Hansestadt (sorry my thoughts flight toward Bremen), the freedom of a pirates island in the middle of the Sea of Forgotten Meanings, a place where CAT cant get your tongue.

As every place with freedom we also attract emarginated minds as they always have the will to express themselves and while dealing with this is a work it also brings sometime rare gifts.

About myself I always presented me like an amateur programmer more than I'm not a programmer but yes, got your point. Perl is my only language in the sense I tried something else and get bored very soon. I'm a Perl native :) and yes I feel I'm a hacker.

Nowadays sadly I do not program at all for two main reasons: the first and sad part is that the company I work for (Spaghetti Company then merged into Macaroni Group ;) prefers to underuse me giving me boring stuff to do. Perl is no fashion since decades and they have a constant need of Big Projects (they are not able to realize btw) and there is no more room for intelligence, creativity and freedom. No searching for Perl jobs anymore: I work 5 hours for a decent (for Eataly) salary, so I stay with this.

The second reason is bound to my personal need to have fun and challenges. Perl used to be my best hobby too for almost 20 years but recently my life changed and I found music more appealing than programming in general. I'm an amateur musician: I play the guitar and I sing and I compose lyrics and songs ..without knowing the basic (as in programming) and without reading music sheets I presented myself with my first MIDI keyboard and I play it with fun and intersting piece of music come out.

I finally took my raspberry PI4 8Gb RAM out of the box and I enjoy playing with Ardour, jackd, guitarix, Hydrogen, Sonic Pi, nylon guitar, a decend external sound card, electric guitar and my voice.

Mixing personal and community stuff, other intersting and related topics are:

• name space
• Ten (years) Here
• red thread
• Re: How has Perl affected you? (started by you)
• Re: Why did you become a Perl expert (or programmer)?
• 20th anniversary of my partecipation here

..so I'm still here somehow, as Jack of all Trades, as amateur programmer or just because here are you, special people with beautiful minds and hearts too.

L*

[hippo]

Anyone else around who have claimed "I'm not a programmer"

Don't think I could - not with a straight face, anyway. Despite little in the way of formal training I've pretty much always been a programmer. The 8-bit glory days started me off properly but even before that there were sorts of proto-programming available if you could recognise the signs. I have had straight-up "programmer" gigs (including a genuine period of employment back in the day) so, yes, I am a programmer.

In old-timer terms, I am part of the 4.036 crowd. I was aware of Perl before that (thanks to usenet) and was aware that it could outstrip the sed and awk with which I was familiar but there did seem to be quite a learning curve even back then. The gawk man page was about 25 sheets of 11x14 but perl was well over 100 - a bit daunting when you just wanted it for some quick hack or other. Finally I gave in and started to plough through the docs when a task came up that was just too gnarly for awk and I really didn't fancy doing text manipulation in C.

Perl has been my language of choice since Y2K. CGI first and then mod_perl showed me that it could do crazy, fantastic things and all with the DWIM style that was already familiar. I started visiting the monastery not long after that (maybe 2002ish) but always anonymously and then just to read and absorb and be inspired by what I found. Finally signed up in 2011 but lurked for another year before posting.

So, I'm still around. But lots of others are not and that is a shame but is also the way of the world. It is also encouraging to see some recent arrivals with good knowledge and/or good questions to ask.

This is still the place to be.

[Tux]

Still here. Active since perl 4.0.36. Still enjoying it.

[roho]

Still here. I've been a programmer since 1969, when I first wired up panels on IBM EAM equipment to collate, reproduce, and print punch cards. I discovered Perl in 1994 and used it extensively for the care and feeding of the largest worldwide database in the Department of Defense for 15 years. Because of Perl I earned the nickname "Mr. Magic", but the real magic was in Perl, not me. Perlmonks has been and remains a godsend of knowledgeable, helpful individuals who make the time to help others. Nine times out of ten when I see a new question it has already been answered by several monks. The speed of monk responses is dizzying!

When I think of Perlmonks, I think of police Sgt Al Powell's response in the movie "Die Hard", "You couldn't drag me away!" :)

[naChoZ]

I'm still here. Not as often, but I am.

I started doing ISP work in the 90's. First for a friend who started a dialup ISP and I had some unix chops so I could be helpful. Then eventually working at an early broadband ISP as a sysadmin.

I had written some shell to automate the creation of DNS records. This was back in the days before BIND had a $GENERATE statement, so each individual ip address had to have its own reverse record entry. Growth was astronomical at the time so it wasn't unusual for me to have to add multiple /19's, /18's, even /17's in a week's time.

Running on an old sparc ultra 5, it took my crappy shell script (doing its math with expr) around 90 minutes to crap out the files for 32,000+ entries. I knew about perl, saw some people do a few things with perl, but I hadn't tried it yet. So I took that shell script and did an almost line-by-line rewrite of it (in all the worst ways) into perl. Got it working. Ran it. 32,000+ records took 4 seconds. I was so dumbfounded I generated the files with the shell version, waited the 90 minutes, diffed the output to compare it with the perl output, exact match.

90 minutes shell, 4 seconds perl. I knew I was on the right track.

Anyway, I also do not call myself a programmer. I'm not. I've met real programmers. I just don't have what they have. The day they handed out symbolic reasoning I must have been absent and had to copy off someone else's homework. I can kinda fake it, but I don't really have it. So I can automate the heck out of a lot of stuff. I've also written a lot of stuff that provides the glue or the conduit for when one system needs to talk to another. And I can use perl for all the things it's good at like ripping through voluminous amounts of data (logs, databases, you name it). But actually doing real software engineering, nope. Brick wall for me.

[dsheroh]

Still around, though I don't think I'd ever call myself "not a programmer". My elementary school decided to teach me AppleSoft BASIC when I was 8, and I took to it like a fish to water, so "not a programmer" has never really been an option for me.

I eventually found Perl by way of getting a Windows IDE at work whose editor had a vi mode, which I liked the power of, so I started learning vi, which lead to learning regexes, and thence to Perl in 1998 or 99. But I'd also been a regular for some years in alt.sysadmin.recovery for some years prior to that, so I was already familiar with Perl by reputation, even if I hadn't actually used it.

[stonecolddevin]

I still lurk from time to time.

I haven't touched perl in about a decade at least but this place still has some of the best programmers I've ever encountered. The community by and large is unmatched and I'm really nostalgic for the era when PM was in its prime.

I've been registered for 22 years apparently. I remember being too nervous to ask anything for probably a year or two, and it took even longer for anything to stick. It took a really long time for me to get a handle on writing code, it just didn't mesh with how my brain worked at the time. But people were patient and nurtured my curiosity. I eventually grew into a software development career in no small part thanks to PM.

I certainly feel like I wasn't a programmer for a long time. Frankly there's still a lot of fundamental programming stuff I just stare at blankly and I'm terrible at programming puzzles. But these days I'm able to put together clean, extendable code that runs at scale so that has to count for something.

Nothing beats early 2000s era web, and I hope I can find a way to start participating around these parts again.

[ForgotPasswordAgain]

My profile says I joined PerlMonks in 2005, but -- as you might guess from my username -- I had previous accounts.. I don't remember what the first "forgot password" account was (since I forgot the password again), but the OG account was kwoff so I joined shortly after 9/11. I wish (jokingly) I had the 1164 XP from that account to catapult me from 391 to 330 on the Saints in our Book list. I'm still a Perl programmer at my current job and hope the final decade or so of my career I'll continue being a Perl programmer. I originally learned of Perl from O'Reilly's "sed & awk" book in the late 90s.

[GrandFather]

In my home node it says "I started using Perl in May 2005 to convert a Word document to TWiki (with pretty successful results) and joined PerlMonks at the end of May." so that must be how it happened. I have a vague memory of a workmate recommending Perl to me for the task. Something about Perl must have appealed because it quickly became my number one tool for writing various tools to automate tasks at work. Following a particularly successful work project I was granted a month of skunk works time so I write an automated build system which became our production build and automated test system for about 10 years until we replaced it with Team City.

My work role has changed to firmware engineer and electronics design support so opportunities for Perl tools have diminished, although I still use Perl to extract information from large sets of data from things like logic analyzers, and plot results.

I still sing the praises of Perl, but the new boys tend much more toward Python. Nothing much to be gained by bucking the trend here - they are more productive in Python and the tools are small in any case. I do quite often get asked about regexes though!

Oh, and these days I'm definitely a programmer even though my first work gig was very electronics focused. Now I feel I've come almost full circle - back to electronic but now combined with programming.

[cavac]

I'm still around. I've been lurking on PM since about 2004 or 2005, but only made an account in 2011.

In 2001 in Berlin, the Chaos Computer Club installed "Project Blinkenlights", an interactive light/art installation. At the Chaos Congress the next year (2002), some people (including me) started to work on projects that allowed playing those animations on the small scale, e.g. without having a soviet-era ministry building at our disposal.

I wrote a "small" command line player in C, which was my language of choice in those days. My best friend saw my code, shook his head, rewrote the thing in like 10 lines of a programming language named "Perl" which i haven't heard of before. I was hooked immediately.

Now, over a two decades laters, i'm still writing open source and commercial software in Perl. Yes, i do some small stuff in C. And, as a web developer, i'm also busy (and getting paid for) cursing at the stupidity that is JavaScript. But it's mostly Perl, a lot of the frontend stuff is done by my younger (and often temporary) collegues these days.

I can't say i ever claimed to be "not a programmer". As i've said before in PerlMonks - my haven of calmness and sanity, talking to computers is somewhat build-in into my brain (whereas talking to people is more of an optional module that never left the beta test stage).

As for "still around", yes, i'm here. And it seems i'm here to stay. You see, more than once i made the too common mistake of answering a questions about the Monastery with "oh, that could be easily fixed with..." and suddenly getting a new user permission and a short message along the lines "You are now allowed to fix it" ;-)

Once there was the discussion on how some links in PM were processed wrong, i unwisely opened my mouth to analyze the problem and suggest solutions... only to discover the next day i was suddenly a member of pmdev. Another time, i was sad to read that Tanktalus was stopping support for last hour of cb and, without any deep thoughts about the responsibility, offered to take over that service and invent chatterbot. But truth be told, all that stuff turned out to be fun learning experiences that brought me closer to this incredible community than just merely answering questions in SoPW ever could.

It's been a wild and fantastic ride so far for me. And it seems, at least on how little we humans can predict the future, there is a lot more to come.

[stevieb]

It is completely overwhelming the response I've received here.

Wow.

I intend to respond to each post individually, even though I haven't run into each of you personally.

It's wonderful to see the love for the language so strong to this day.

I especially enjoy your stories of history as to how you came to be a Perlmonks member.

I'm Steve Bertrand, aka, stevieb., and I am pleased to meet you.

[RonW]

I'm still around. Mostly lurking. I am definitely a programmer - and a maker.

I love to make things that do things. In fact, that's my job I get paid for.

Perl is an amazingly powerful tool that helps me get my thing making done (and earn a pay check). Been programming with Perl since 1997. Before then, I was programming with AWK. Perl is another level of powerful. Much as I liked AWK, I would not go back - I would and have rewritten many of my old AWK tools (though that was very long ago).

Perl Monks is a great community. Lots of interesting people doing interesting things. I look forward to being part of this community for many years to come.

[pfaut]

Well, I wouldn't say I'm still around because I haven't been here much in a long time but I was very active here in 2003 or so. In late 2002 I found myself working for a startup that was just about to fail. I was having trouble finding work so I had some spare time on my hands. I started hanging out here while making enough money to get by working for a friend that built websites. By mid-2003 I found a job and my spare time got severely cut back. I eventually drifted away from the site. I stopped back every once in a while but never got back into the habit.

I got my first PC in June 1992. It didn't take long for me to get tired of single-tasking windows. I was used to multitasking and asynchronous programming on VMS. I started playing with linux in November. I wanted to learn some scripting and heard about this perl thing and it looked interesting. I started doing a lot of programming with perl 4. It kind of reminded me of my first programming language, BASIC, but much more powerful. I was hooked.

It's a shame how quiet this place has gotten. Back then it was difficult to keep up with all of the activity.

[marto]

I hung around here for while then stopped. I think it's a shame more people don't hang around here....

Many such cases....

[harangzsolt33]

Maybe 30 years from now (if the world still exists), I will come here and say, "Yes, I am still here." But currently, I'm just a newbie. I'm not a programmer either. I enjoy computer programming just like some people enjoy solving crossword puzzles. They don't make a living solving crossword puzzles; it's just something they enjoy doing in their free time. That's me. Ever since I was a child, I have been fascinated by data compression algorithms, file systems, viruses, and now, my latest fascination is with computer graphics--how transformations, filters, and various effects are produced at the most basic R-G-B level.