The first programming language I learned was BASIC on a PDP-8 in high school. The second part of that programming course covered FORTRAN and assembler. After high school I went to tech school for electronics. The school offered some optional courses on computer programming so I took them. It covered the same languages but this time it was on a PDP-11.

When I completed tech school, I got hired by Digital Equipment Corp. as a field service engineer. I got an account on the office computers and would stay after hours programming on them. Mostly I programmed in BASIC. DEC's BASIC was a very powerful language and it was easy to throw together a program to do just about anything in a short period of time. Occassionally I'd want to do something that was beyond what could easily be done in BASIC so I'd write it in assembler.

Eventually, I started playing with linux. By this time, I had become fairly proficient in C programming and most of my quick hacks were written in C. When I discovered perl, it reminded me a lot of BASIC due to its string handling capabilities. Over the last few years, many of my quick little hacks have been done in perl. With the wealth of libraries available from CPAN, I can usually find something that already does what I would have had to code in C or assembler before.

These days I do a lot of C++ and Java programming. It's a bit difficult to use these languages for quick little hacks but I do like programming in an object oriented style. It just makes things a lot easier if some part of the hack turns out to be reusable. It also makes it easier to maintain code since it forces you to group related functions together in your source. Perl gives me a language with an incredible amount of power to make the difficult tasks easy without requiring a lot of overhead just to set up a program.

Due to perl's portability, I have been able to write scripts that could run on linux under apache, on Windows NT under IIS, and on VMS under the OSU http server. Perl provides a viable scripting language for Windows where I was able to replace a dozen horidly complex and twisted command procedures with a perl program to drive the build process for our system at work.

So, I guess the reasons I use perl are because of its portability, its power, its ability to grow with my programming abilities, and its ability to be as simple or complex as my needs require.

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print map { my ($m)=1<<hex($_)&11?' ':'';
$m.=substr('AHJPacehklnorstu',hex($_),1) }
split //,'2fde0abe76c36c914586c';
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