Re: What was the bait (project, problem or opportunity) that hooked you on Perl?

[dsheroh]

I find it mildly amusing that the thing which brought me to Perl was the thing which most people seem to find most repulsive about it: Regular expressions.

It was 1999. While the rest of the world fretted over y2k, I was working with a manufacturing software company (not exactly ERP, but close enough) and writing Delphi 2 code. I loved the language but hated the IDE's editor. I had been flirting with various unix-like OSes on and off for a bit over a decade and was haunted by fond memories of vi.

When it got to be too much for me, I managed to locate an editor plugin which offered a vi mode and convinced management to buy me a copy. Once I'd reprogrammed my fingers to remember that I wasn't in a modeless editor any more, I was pleased, but it still wasn't quite what I wanted. I had been away from *nix for too long and my vi-fu had grown weak.

My next stop was to buy myself a copy of Learning the vi Editor, which reminded me of all the things I had forgotten and taught me many I had never known. It also showed me things that could be done with regular expressions, while also showing that they had power beyond my grasp...

The cycle repeated itself again, as I picked up Mastering Regular Expressions and learned its topic while getting a glimpse of how Perl - previously unknown to me aside from the name - could transcend even the glory of the regex.

This sent me to meet the Llama for an introduction to Perl and the Coriolis Perl Black Book to really get me going with the language.

Now, several years later, I haven't yet encountered anything that Perl gives me a taste of without also providing in fullness, so I haven't felt the need to move on since getting here and I don't expect to do so any time soon.

[Anonymous Monk]

Long before my epiphany with vim I'd been using Dreamweaver for HTML authoring and digging further into it's capabilities I came across its regular expression features within Find & Replace. There was a note in "Dreamweaver Bible" referring to "Mastering Regular Expressions" which I found in a local library and from there I realised Perl was the languaged to learn if you wanted access to the full power of regexes. I next read the first 2/3 of "Programming Perl" while also trying to learn Java. By day I wrestled with Java OO and by night I relaxed with Larry Wall's entertaining tome. I only had space in my life for one "real" programming language so Perl won.