I started with Perl in Januari 1995. I had just finished a
project that consisted of creating a website for a division
of one of the largest multinationals of the world. All we had
was a CD-ROM with images, and a (corrupt) ASCII dump of a
database, and 160 hours. I did the job with a bunch of shell
and awk programs. It took three hours to run, creating about
500 HTML pages, and about 1000 images.
Even during the project, I thought there should be a more
convenient way. So, sometime after the project was completed, I started
to learn Perl. I started with perl4, but within the hour I wanted
to do multidimensional arrays. Not knowing how to do it, I
looked for a Usenet group. Found comp.lang.perl, waited a few
hours before my upstream UUCP nodes were configured to pass me
the group. Soon after I started reading the group, I became
aware perl4 was history. I got myself perl5.000h, read all the
manuals back-to-back, and the rest is history.
Abigail
