[bm98]

That was a great talk! Notice how his entire career got launched from an internship at Tektronix. I love the bit about how he found his own troff macros in use at O'Reilly because a coworker had taken his code there years before -- and he appreciated that! One might say that the same kind of "80's hacker ethic" is what got him into trouble at Intel.

The Camel book was so well-written. It was my introduction to Perl, which became my "superpower" in the 90's and far longer into the 2000's than I tend to admit. I eventually switched to Python because it's the closest thing that is considered an acceptable "modern" choice. I really enjoy Python too, but the obligatory XKCD about Python[1] rang true for me about Perl first.

For me the #1 superpower strength of both languages is the first-class treatment and syntactic sugar for associative arrays (a.k.a. hashes, dictionaries).

Perl did the same for regexes and file I/O; Python did not.

I have come to appreciate Perl's backwards compatibility -- that old scripts still run unchanged -- though maybe that's largely because Perl 5 has been in maintenance mode for so long.

[1] https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/python.png

[creer]

> Perl 5 has been in maintenance mode for so long

Perl 5 has been adding features consistently over the years, not just fixing bugs. Many people just ignore the new features, but you don't have to.