http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=72270

In a thread in comp.lang.perl.misc titled "So what do YOU use Perl for?", Gwyn Judd suggested:
I use it to impress women.
Around 1993 or 1994 I started dating a woman who was a quilter. After seeing a lot of quilts and pictures of quilts, it seemed to me that most quilters stuck to a few traditional quilt blocks and that there might be a lot of quilt blocks that were rarely used.

I wrote a suite of Perl programs to generate all the quilt blocks of a certain type (sixteen-patch half-square triangles with 90-degree rotational symmetry) and I printed out the result.

I was delighted, because the results confirmed my suspicion: There are a lot of excellent but rarely-seen quilt blocks.

I was even more delighted when we got married, and she made the program output into a real quilt and gave it to me as a wedding present.

She must have been impressed.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Impress Women
by koolade (Pilgrim) on Apr 13, 2001 at 18:45 UTC

    I was in a long-distance relationship once, and my girlfriend would complain about how I didn't email her enough. So I put together a quick perl script that would send her a message and the output of fortune for a bit of randomization. Then I used cron to run the script every morning, so she'd get an email from me every day.

    She was very pleased for the first days, until she realized that it was automated. But even after that she was pretty impressed and appreciative. A year later, we're married, and she's still getting those messages every morning.

      Allow me to point once again at spew. That might have done the trick, had you had sufficient grammars for variation.

      Not that I'm claiming that I ever did this. {grin}

      -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

        This sort of thing could have been very useful coupled with my getadate.pl script which would randomly select females from the Hope student directory and return e-mail addresses and phone numbers. I can't say I ever put it to use. It was just a natural extension to the Hope directory searching script.

        vroom | Tim Vroom | vroom@cs.hope.edu
      push (@my_personal_chick_arsenal,"This node..."); Such sweet ideas actually. Too bad my g/f is a geek. That means I need to obfuscate anything I send her just to keep her amused, huh?

      _14k4 - webmaster@poorheart.com (www.poorheart.com)
      Could you tell us more about how your script generated a message? That is, did the stuff other than 'fortune' change every day at random?
Re: Impress Women
by virtualsue (Vicar) on Apr 14, 2001 at 02:08 UTC
    Perl impresses men, too. I have finally converted my sh/ksh scripting husband into a perl advocate. He was very resistant, probably because he'd spent so many years building up a large repertoire of sh tools, but the speed & power of perl have finally won him over. That, and my merciless taunting.

    "Nyah nyah, whose scripts are so slow? Who requires 2 dozen lines of sh where 1 in perl would do?"

      Perl is on of the few places where "Ha ha, mine is smaller" wins.

      Yeah. I use perl to be an impressive woman. And to meet guys. -lisa
        Hi, I you are a ( rare ) geek woman, I think you can appreciate this URL : http://www.copinedegeek.com/ It's a nice french site about how these girls keep their geek for them. Bye. Learn French
(redmist) Re: Impress Women
by redmist (Deacon) on Apr 13, 2001 at 07:11 UTC

    Could it really be that our own ai l ie has tied the knot with the ever eminent Dominus?

    redmist
    Silicon Cowboy
Re: Impress Women
by defyance (Curate) on Mar 14, 2002 at 01:25 UTC
    Bringing life to an older thread. I stumbled on this some how and had to add in my $.02.. Go Here to see how I impressed a woman with Perl.. It wasn't the most inovative, or functional thing. However, she thought it was the greatest, and we Wed August 9th.

    -- Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of defyance.
Re: Impress Women
by tinita (Parson) on Jul 08, 2008 at 18:41 UTC
    i have to say as a girl it's fairly easy to impress guys by just saying you're programming; no need to demonstrate at all =)
    the only ones that are not impressed are geeks themselves.
Re: Impress Women
by vrk (Chaplain) on Jul 08, 2008 at 19:34 UTC

    Lots of marriages here! Well, we'll be getting married later this year as well, so who am I to talk...

    I previously reported a similar occasion, and no less than today did I convert a couple hundred of her screenshots from BMP to JPG using Perl and ImageMagick. She was very pleased. I don't use Perl to impress women, only her.

    --
    print "Just Another Perl Adept\n";