I think I first heard about it in the late 80's, early 90's when I read about some guy having an encryption/decryption algorithim tattooed on his body, written in Perl. Since U.S. law prohibits the exportation of 'restricted munitions' (this code was an example), then theoretically this guy couldn't leave the country. I'd love to find that article again and see how faulty my memory is.

My first steps were getting frustrated with writing "grind 'em up and spit 'em out" C programs, and moving to awk (for DOS, of course) for that work. That led fairly smoothly on to Perl scripts doing the same thing (taking memory model information and generating SQL), and from there it was a short leap into CGI programming during the Internet boom. Finally, hosting some web sites with pair Networks I read about Perl Monks in an interview with Damian Conway and immediately signed up here.

I continue to learn.

Updated: Added two punctuation marks.