Well, back in the Perl 4 days, my then partner, now wife, was doing things with a heathen beast called Access. She had a whole lot of records for the same person, each one with different fields in it. So, in th eprocess of writing seomthing that would look at each record and make a single record with the data taken from all of the records. Basically to get a single record as complete as possible.

I cannot even recall if Perl 4 had the use strict prgama. If it did, I sure as hell hadn't figured out how to use it! It took days and days, I think I discovered every possible way of slicing anything rather than getting at an element. I hadn't figured out how to talk to the database, so we exported a CSV format file which was in sorted order, then we ran the script. It actually worked, which amazed me more than a little.

Over the next few years I spent a lot of time studying Perl. My local bookstore was a problem, they didn't carry O'Reilly! So I tried all sorts of strange books until eventually I found a store that did and then I was off. I have given away some of the O'Reilly books, but right up to today I can proudly say that I have purchased every O'Reilly Perl related book as it came out. They haven't always been the best possible thing, but they have all been useful in one way or another!

Now I have discovered the monastery. What a revelation! By reading here, asking questions and working hard I think my programming style has improved beyond measure. Now I can look back on code only a year or two old ans say "well, thats pretty bad!".

In the old days I was scared of strict, scared of modules, didn't understand references and OO was more of an OOps thing.

Now, I always use trict, always enable warnings, use modules wherever I can. OO is now becoming a happy paradigm, references roll of my tongue easily and I feel my own code quality improves day by day. Thats why I love Perl!

jdtoronto