[jasonrhaas]

Other than C++ in high school, Perl was one of the first languages that I learned. At the time I was working on Unix systems in a closed off, secured area with no access to the internet. I was doing systems work, and the only tools I really had at my disposal was what was on the servers I had in the space with me. If I was lucky I got a system with a modern Linux OS on it like Red Hat, but sometimes I had to work on a Solaris UNIX system that was pretty bare bones.

The options for scripting were either bash or perl. After some digging around I found some scripts that other engineers wrote in Perl. Mostly using it for text replacement, regex, and basic server functions.

I was intrigued by the weird syntax and very powerful one liners, so I got some books and taught myself basic Perl. I started writing some quick scripts and it made me feel like I had a super power. Most of all, Perl was fun with all the different ways you could do things. It was like a puzzle.

Fast forward to my first "real" software job. Most of the code case was written in Python, so I started learning that. I wrote a couple scripts in Perl to do some basic text stuff that I thought would actually be less elegant in Python. While I thought I was quite clever, the other engineers immediately jumped on me and told me to never write any Perl code again. Something about "hard to maintain", "too many ways to do it", etc.

After that I never wrote any "real" code in Perl, but I kind of want to write some clever, convoluted Perl code just because I can.