Perl has furthered my career in a rather curious fashion: it introduced me to Perlmonks. Thanks to this site, I've started to learn so much more about programming theory that I can confidently sit down with a new language and have an idea of what good programming practices are before I even start. Usually, prior to Perlmonks, I was one of those programmers who did a great job of churning out spaghetti code that worked, but was a bear to maintain.

Now, thanks to Perlmonks and the many excellent discussions here, I've a much better understanding of object-oriented, functional, and logic programming. Problems with encapsulation or poorly structured algorithms tend to jump out at me when I look at code. Further, due to my visibility on Perlmonks, I've worked in Amsterdam, ran Portland Perl Mongers (I just stepped down), and developed many friends and contacts that I never would previously have developed. I'm very grateful for this and I appreciate everyone here as a result. I especially appreciate those who take the time to tell me when (and why) I'm being an idiot.

So yes, Perl has helped as I've programmed almost exclusively in Perl for almost three years, but the Perl community and Perlmonks in particular has been what has allowed me to really establish my career.

Cheers,
Ovid

New address of my CGI Course.
Silence is Evil (feel free to copy and distribute widely - note copyright text)

I also can't imagine how my name would have been in print literally 20 million times, although I had already produced and written a shelf-ful of books before I started on the first camel. They just didn't have my name anywhere visible, since I had been a technical ghostwriter.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

"... although I had already produced and written a shelf-ful of books ..."

I suppose you wouldn't be willing to dramatically increase your lawyer bills by giving an example or two of these books? :P

Oh, they weren't very exciting. And there's nothing that keeps me from listing them in a public place, except my memory. {grin}

Stuff like (titles approximate):

• Tektronix 8002 Microprocessor Development Lab User's Guide
• Tektronix 8560 User's Manual
• Sequent System User Manual
• Tandem System C2 Security Administration Guide
• Intel 80960XA Processor Architecture Manual
• and a lot more that I'm forgetting right now...
Yeah, mundane stuff, for the salaries I drew at Tektronix and Sequent, and on contracts to Tandem and Intel/BiiN. The Tek and Tandem gigs were the best, because I learned the techwriting biz and structures under the watchful eyes of a legend in the industry, Lyle Settle. That's the "Lyle" in the dedication in the Llama preface. The "Jack" there is Jack Falk, a superb techeditor at Tek, and the guy who taught me to write like I talk.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

Perl has certainly helped further my career, and also added in the keeping of my sanity over the last few years. I first learned perl in a data and file processing class in college. I currently do about half my programming in perl and the other half in C/C++. I work on H/A application agents; perl is a fantastic tool for this job. One of the great things about perl is that my proof of concepts (can we cluster this?) often can be used to build the agent on top of. I have also used perl to automate all of the parts of my job I don’t like, like automating support matrix updates, cvs updates (we have multiple source trees here and it gets confusing at times). I don’t feel I would have gotten this job if I didn’t know perl. We have one other perl coder and my department and about 10 total in the building (250 or so people). It defiantly helped me get my foot in the door, and has helped me keep my job in this less that wonderful economy.

All and all I am very thankful for the people who created perl, taught it to me, and those that continue to help me learn it.

What really helped my career is my small contributions in open source. I got one job partially because of perl module (Mail::CheckUser) I wrote and I got another job partially because I've been helping people on HTML::Mason mailing list.

--
Ilya Martynov, ilya@iponweb.net
CTO IPonWEB (UK) Ltd
Quality Perl Programming and Unix Support UK managed @ offshore prices - http://www.iponweb.net
Personal website - http://martynov.org

Larry's lectures lead me to Perl which lead me to Perlmonks. It's hard to figure whether it was the Perl or Perlmonks has taken me from doing/having jobs to having a career.

Prior to Perlmonks I was quite satisfied with just writing code that accomplished the task. I was clueless to structure, reusability, and the need for solid application architecture. If it worked it was good enough. Perl allowed me to get the jobs done faster than coders in other languages which afforded me some recognition, but it was Perlmonks that exposed me to the value of good coding practices. Probably most helpful was a reccomendation to read the Pragmatic programmer.

Armed with all of this imput I put together an Enterprise application in Perl that was fully POD documented (and pod2html), with several reusable modules that appears to have not only lifted me past the layoffs, but put me in a position that approves new product architectures.

Currently I'm buried in Java J2ee, but if someone needs a script, Perl still is almost always the right tool to utilize. If weren't for the Damian's book (and attending a lecture of his), I doubt I would have *groked* the fundamental concepts and nuances of OO programming that much of my current code is completely dependant upon

I don't know that it has furthered my career yet. But it does keep me valuable. Automation is a good thing especially in times of economic woa.

People should always learn new things and not fixate on one thing. Specialists can die but a good generalist will go on.

I have been told I need to learn Python and Ruby now. So the fun continues.

After writing numerous file utilities in C, I finally started using awk to do file processing on my DOS/Windows 3.1 machine about ten years ago. At my next job, I wanted to do some file processing again and decided to try this somewhat more complicated language Perl. The first few days were tough slogging, but as I wrote more and more complicated scripts I became more and more impressed with how flexible and fast it was.

Knowing 'just enough' Perl meant I could help my cousin's husband with a task that he'd had no luck with, parsing a print image. Once I'd successfully done that, he signed me up to work on the Perl scripts that ran his web site. That led to getting involved in the Perl community, including YAPC (summer 1999 was my first), Perl Mongers and Perl Monks (starting in December 2001), and that led to my current job where I'm doing Perl, CGI, PostgreSQL and some Unix SysAdmin type stuff.

I guess if I turned the question around, I could say that without Perl, the last four years would have been very tough for me. I have indeed benefitted from Perl, from CPAN, from learning about how Perl does OO (it's not perfect, but it does a pretty darn good job). And last but not least, what a terrific user community.

I'm the only one in my group that does Perl at all, but that doesn't stop me from trying to interest those around me. One day they'll have to bite the bullet and learn it as I can't do this by myself forever.

I would say the things i've learnt from perl, primarily design philosophy and implementation, as well as communication of these ideas, have helped quite a bit more. For example, I had a task to automate a business process. The original implementation was unscalable, and unsupportable, and after a couple of hours of careful thinking, a solution was bourne that would allow arbitrary business flows to be automated to an arbitrary level of complexity.

The lessons learnt along this path mean i can mentor others in my team and help them grow, hopefully one day into my position, where hopefully i'll be moving to the next level.

Well .. I'm not that sure about the career. But it did help me to stay sane. (Or maybe to keep my insanity at a tolerable level? It's not for me to tell.) It did help a lot in automating things in my previous job (network admin+user support), but all that was lost due to my inexperience. I let the management believe that "the guys can do it". Yes we managed, but I don't have to tell you that 15+ hours a day is a little too much. Not that the management would notice or the salary would be worth it.

What was actually more important at that time than fact that I could automate things and thus save time (that I wasted anyway) was that I could help people on the mailing lists and they (unlike the management and most users) did say the much needed thanks from time to time.

Currently I'm working as a developer, but Perl is treated here something like a black stoker on a 19th century steamer. Something below the surface that keeps the ship moving but noone wants to talk about. And if they do they say that it stinks, not that it stokes. Plus the policy is something like "OK, if you really must you can use it. If you must. But if it's at all possible use VB/VBScript." The only change lately is that instead of VB they start insisting on C#. And of course befuddled by the marketing hype they think I can+should rewrite everything in the "great" "new" language.

So I would say, Perl did help me to get bigger salary, but it's not viewed here as "the way to go". And I'm supposed to be learning&improving C#, not Perl. As Jason put it "I am on my own."

But Perl related jobs (that would not be mainly Unix admins with some Perl) are scarce here (Czech Rep.)

Jenda

Writing Perl was so much fun that I thought 'hey, I could do this full time'. I started looking around and I was lucky enough to interview with a Perl fan who was willing to take a chance on someone without a CS degree and 10 years of Java experience :). Four and a half years later I'm still there... also through two rounds of layoffs. I believe my Perl skills (and the infrastructure I built with them) are a big part of the reason for that.

I often think about the difference that Perl has made in my life. I was familiar with C and C++, I now write a fair amount of Java, and I've dabbled with a few other languages. But none have impressed me the way Perl did.