Re: Your Favorite Heroic Perl Story

[holli]

the set:
I was not long at my new job when i wrote some little tools for my personal ease, when my boss looked over my shoulder.

>> What is this?
<< That is perl. It is a language...
>> I know what is is, we donīt use that, itīs whacky.
>> But,
<< No but. We donīt use it!
>> Ah, ok. .oO(a*****e)Oo.

Two or three weeks later, i looked over the bosses shoulder while he tried to write a filter for a textfile (in VB) with heavy use of index(), substring() and ugly long if/else constructions. It ended up with 70 lines of code and three hours work.
I let him do that and in the meantime i prepared a one-liner in the

perl -n -e "print if //" infile>outfile

style (one line, 2 minutes).

When i showed it to him he was first angry and then amazed. And since that day we use perl a lot and i am the companies "chief of perl".

[demerphq]

I got into perl by writing a tool that would parse and extend VB classes with DB interaction (automatically generate a DB schema to make the classes persistent as well as adding persistancy methods to the code). I have never really done any signifigant VB after that project, its all been perl since then pretty much. :-)

[Anonymous Monk]

So, all you did was to reinvent grep? Because that's what a perl -ne 'print if //' is.

[crenz]

Since this seems to be a Windows shop, they might not have grep. Plus, he might have preferred to use Perl for some reason. No need to be so judgmental.