Me and Perl, we go back a ways. Not a long long ways, but a ways. Back to 2000, Perl 5.6.0, I think. I had a shiny Red Hat 7.0 box, back when Red Hat was a poster child, not Real Serious Enterprise Only.

I randomly decided to complement my C/C++ skillz (you know, "real" languages that you'd get a job with) with some s‎crip‎ting language. man perl? Beautiful, a lovely TOC, syntax, everything you could possibly want to know and then some. "XS", that was pure magic, glorious and fresh and new. This would be okay.

I tried the other s‎crip‎ting language. man python... nothing. info python? They couldn't possibly like info. (I had yet to discover pinfo, the less-addictive alternative for making info pages tolerable.) Still nothing. Well then, the poor college student chooses Perl. It has documentation!

This was a brilliant move on my part, if underappreciated at the time. Python wants to be easy, the lovely one everyone wants. It's cute and shy and quiet. Unlike Perl, which pushes subtle distinctions like my/local/our in your face and says cryptic things like "lexical". Not that I really understood it for another few years. But that's how Perl is: you can't sit comfortably in ignorance because it's got a lot of power calling you forward to your destiny.

Why PerlMonks then, 8 years on? I'm writing PHP these days and hating every minute of it. I need to get back to the Perl flavor of destiny. It's so much better when your destiny can DWIM.