I started programming seriously in Fortran as part of a PhD project. My programs produced screens and screens of text output. I often was only interested with the statistics of this output, but the section of interest was always changing.

So I started to use awk to generate statistics. This served me well for a while, then I wanted to automate my programs. Changing the parameters, running the program, and analysing the output seemed hard (if it is possible) in Awk.

Then I noticed the Llama book on a colleagues desk. I worked through the first chapter, and soon was happy with what I could do.

As a result of this, I got a freelance job coding CGI scripts, then moved into PHP/MySQL, and now I am back at Perl.