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My first memorable Perl project was:

by duelafn (Parson)
on Oct 01, 2021 at 20:51 UTC ( [id://11137180]=poll: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

Vote on this poll

A scientific project
[bar] 19/19%
A system/database administration tool
[bar] 32/32%
A game
[bar] 1/1%
A toy/personal tool
[bar] 9/9%
Other web based tool
[bar] 17/17%
None of the above
[bar] 22/22%
100 total votes
Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: My first memorable Perl project was:
by talexb (Chancellor) on Oct 02, 2021 at 02:18 UTC

    The first one that I thought was pretty cool was something that took a memory model (in tabular format) and generated the necessary CREATE TABLE commands to build the table, complete with primary key and foreign key constraints. Then it took that output (in the Unix pipe-lining philosophy) and checked that each of the tables primary key types matched the foreign key types when they appeared in other tables; another script ordered the commands, so that the independent tables appeared first, followed by the dependent tables.

    It impressed the hell out of the senior consultant on the contract, which didn't hurt. It definitely sold me on the value of Perl as an Open Source tool. I sure wish I'd made copies of those scripts. That was in about '98, and (I think) Perl 5 had just come out. Good times.

    PS Oh yeah, all built without actual access to an SQL database .. I just looked up the appropriate syntax on-line. Such a geek.

    Alex / talexb / Toronto

    Thanks PJ. We owe you so much. Groklaw -- RIP -- 2003 to 2013.

Re: My first memorable Perl project was:
by perldigious (Priest) on Oct 04, 2021 at 15:44 UTC

    I reinvented the wheel of course...

    Before I knew what a database was and that there was this thing called SQL I had the problem at work where I had to manually parse, filter, and cross reference very large data sets every week that were presented to me as massive very slow to load spreadsheets. Having some very old and dusty coding ability I hadn't used since college (I became an electronics hardware engineer) and annoyed by the time consuming manual process of going through the spreadsheets, I decided to try to automate it.

    A colleague who had previously worked for IBM long ago suggested I learn Perl to try to do it (he said a lot of his coworkers at IBM used Perl). I bought a copy of Learning Perl, spent my free time at work going through it, and once finished basically wrote a rudimentary database tool (I just didn't know it at the time) that extracted all/only the relevant columns from each data set, used hashes to give each row of each dataset a "primary key" via the hash key, and more or less wrote some basic core Perl to do what I later learned SQL and an actual database could do a lot more efficiently given the size of the datasets.

    I don't regret it though, it lead to me using Perl for lots, and lots, and LOTs, of other very cool things. At my peak Perl usage, I once was able to use it to extract millions of storage locations/part numbers/inventory counts from our central database, decode (they followed a complex but consistent algorithm) the locations in to exact physical coordinates and storage location dimensions within our warehouse, and modify the files (fortunately human readable) used by my company's expensive warehouse motion simulation tool to automatically draw all our pallet racking, shelving, etc. in the proper physical location, to scale, with an inventory snapshot of any given day requested for ultimate use in the active simulation tool.

    As merely a "dabbler" in coding/computer science, I would have never thought I would ever be capable of something like that, but that's what Perl enabled me to do... in my own hackish, workaround way. :-)

    Just another Perl hooker - My clients appreciate that I keep my code clean but my comments dirty.

      P.S. I owe a lot of thanks to many of the Monks here for helping me through many of the learning hurdles I faced along the way. I have little doubt that without a helpful community like Perl Monks to use as an occasional crutch when necessary, I would have given up on probably half of the things I accomplished without ever making them work.

      Just another Perl hooker - My clients appreciate that I keep my code clean but my comments dirty.
Re: My first memorable Perl project was:
by Tux (Canon) on Oct 01, 2021 at 21:14 UTC

    Integration of the Unify database interface into perl-4.036


    Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn
Re: My first memorable Perl project was:
by dbuckhal (Chaplain) on Oct 04, 2021 at 20:53 UTC

    Game

    It was a port of a C++ FLTK based class project: Battleship

    While learning Perl and Tk, I decided to port that game. Needless to say the Perl/Tk version turned out pretty darn good, minus the sound effects I had in the C++ version.

    After selecting One of Two players, you used a coordinate selector widget to place your ships. It included "mini map" to give you an idea of the ship placement. I even added an "Auto Pick" button for the lazy perl hacker I was turning into. The rest was just a basic grid of buttons to battle on.

    So, not a major-work-project-difference-maker, but it was still a very fun learning experience.

Re: My first memorable Perl project was:
by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on Oct 01, 2021 at 21:50 UTC
Re: My first memorable Perl project was:
by karlgoethebier (Abbot) on Oct 01, 2021 at 22:40 UTC
Re: My first memorable Perl project was:
by dsheroh (Monsignor) on Oct 14, 2021 at 07:44 UTC
    I was working at a company that had an existing voice mail product, and they were adding the ability to access your voicemail via the web. I was doing the back-end to integrate them and whipped up some tools in Perl to test sending and receiving UDP datagrams.

    The web part was pointedly not using Perl, because the CTO was convinced that it absolutely had to be apache modules written in plain C (not C++, can't afford the extra overhead!) for absolute maximum performance when retrieving the data from an SQL database and before passing it off to an XSL engine to turn it into a web page. Shockingly, this was one of his least-bad decisions.

Re: My first memorable Perl project was:
by silent11 (Vicar) on Oct 14, 2021 at 20:54 UTC
    I built a shopping cart/e-commerce web app for a record shop.
Re: My first memorable Perl project was:
by Bod (Parson) on Oct 21, 2021 at 20:58 UTC

    For me it is quite recent...Controlling USB on Raspberry Pi

    A Raspberry Pi that reads the time from the network, sunrise and sunset from a public API and opens and closes my blind uncle's curtains at the right times which can be set remotely from my mobile (or any other browser).

    There is still the small issue of getting it to work with Alexa. This is the stumbling block to that -> Alexa 'retrievable' (not all strictly Perl)

Re: My first memorable Perl project was:
by Takeshi Kovacs (Beadle) on Oct 15, 2021 at 11:41 UTC
    End of the 90 the internet was still young, more and more students had access.

    I learned HTML and JavaScript and created static content management and tutorials for uni courses in Bash. They were meant to be downloaded too.

    Hit the wall with bash and started migrating some parts to Perl by googling examples.

    Monstrous code mash.

    Took me awhile to realize that try and error with Bash and Basic background isn't good enough for Perl.

Re: My first memorable Perl project was:
by cavac (Parson) on Oct 28, 2021 at 07:09 UTC
    Command line player for the original (2001) Blinkenlights animation files.
    perl -e 'use Crypt::Digest::SHA256 qw[sha256_hex]; print substr(sha256_hex("the Answer To Life, The Universe And Everything"), 6, 2), "\n";'

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