The quote below is from an interview of Tom Christiansen done by a company called Webpedia in 1999. The company appears to have been swallowed. The advice still rings true for me. I keep a copy of this interview in a file folder labelled "Why I Write Code".

"My advice to budding programmers is to be a tinkerer. Get under the hood of your engine and find out what makes it tick. Figure out what its components are and how they fit together. Get a copy of the Bach book, the one with the V6 Unix source code in it. Realize that aesthetics matter, and most importantly abandon your nascent career as a programmer if you are doing it to satisfy economic goals. It is important that you like to play, like to tinker, like to solve problems. You must derive joy in writing a program."

Find something you love, and apply perl to it. My example is soccer. I ran a website for a youth soccer club. I'm now building a fantasy soccer game. I suppose I could write income tax preparation software in perl, but my heart is not in it. I'd rather have some fun.

So have some fun. Use perl to do a good deed. I believe you can use perl to derive some joy and bring some joy at the same time. And I know all the good problems haven't been taken. Good Luck!
Dave

---

Code On!