When I answer the question "how long have you been using Perl" folks often times don't believe me. There are folks out there that think Perl is only a few years old.

My first introduction to Perl was when I worked for a very small semiconductor manufacturer that went out of business in the late eighties. It also conincides with my first introduction to UUCP and the Usenet. It is one of my earliest memories having to do with Unix System Administration and actually writing scripts and programs on the platform. I was responsible at the time for the care and feeding of an HP 9000 Model 840, and HP 9000 Model 820 and a wealth of HP9000 Model 3x0 systems all running early releases HPUX. Not to mention HP's bastard step child the HP 9000 Model 500 that we had in one of our labs.

Over a 2400 baud modem connection to the University of Rutgers I read the newsgroups on USENET that had anything to do with programming in Unix, any source code for "neat" stuff for Unix and I learned at a frightening rate the trade of being a Unix professional.

Well one day a set of "shar" files caught my attention and I remembered reading a news article in one of the USENET groups about this thing called "Perl." and how it would revolutionize Unix scripting. In unpacked/assembled/decoded the shar files (actually they were unencoded/compressed/shar files that were split IIRC) and ran Configure accepted defaults and it refused to compile. Lots of errors. Asked around the news groups and within a couple of days /usr/local/bin on my system (and other directories) had pieces of Perl installed in them.

The first thing I noticed about the language was that I could stop piping one command to another to cut to awk to sed to.... oh you get the idea. I then went on a campaign of converting all my existing shell scripts to Perl and I haven't looked back since. I still write the occasional bash script but 99.999999% of my scripts are now in Perl.

And that was a long time ago this all happened....

Excerpt from the timeline of Perl:

1987

UUNET is founded with Usenix funds to provide commercial
 UUCP and Usenet access. Originally an experiment by 
Rick Adams and Mike O'Dell

    Hmm, doubtful. The source code generally wasn't there when I needed it.
    -- Larry Wall when asked if he learned Perl from the perl source

Perl 1.000 is unleashed upon the world. Some People 
take Perls' Birthday seriously. Behold as Randal sings 
Happy Birthday to Larrys' answering machine. The 
description from the original man page sums up this 
new language well. (18 December)

	NAME
		perl | Practical Extraction and Report Language

	SYNOPSIS
    	perl options filename args

	DESCRIPTION
     	Perl is a interpreted language optimized for scanning  arbi-
     	trary  text  files,  extracting  information from those text
     	files, and printing reports based on that information.  It's
     	also  a good language for many system management tasks.  The
     	language is intended to be practical  (easy  to  use,  effi-
     	cient,  complete)  rather  than  beautiful  (tiny,  elegant,
     	minimal).  It combines (in  the  author's  opinion,  anyway)
     	some  of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people
     	familiar with those languages should have little  difficulty
     	with  it.  (Language historians will also note some vestiges
     	of csh, Pascal, and  even  BASIC|PLUS.)   Expression  syntax
     	corresponds  quite  closely  to C expression syntax.  If you
     	have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk  or  sh,
     	but  it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little fas-
     	ter, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C,  then
     	perl  may  be  for  you.  There are also translators to turn
     	your sed and awk scripts  into  perl  scripts.   OK,  enough
     	hype.

Very lucky! Without perlmonks I wouldn't have learned that quickly.

I was lucky, by the time I started to learn Perl there was a brilliant book available (with a camel on the front as I recall) :-) )

Thanks merlyn

> When I started Perl, there was no newsgroup, mailing list, > books, trainings, or even Matt's Script Archive! You kids > all got it lucky! Show off! Len. Hack Perler

Have you noticed how two of these categories overlap? (1-3, 2-5). I have been using Perl for about two years now. I had played with it once before, but never had an application for it, but now I use Perl every day and can't possibly imagine how I could do anything without it.

Maybe you can create a Perl script to fix that! :)

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.

Here it is in French. I don't speak French, but the picture said it all. (The fish's version sounded a little funny in places.) Another thing I saw after googling for that was a reference to Wired '96, but I don't see where they have stuff archived....

---

...every application I have ever worked on is a glorified munger...

Yeah, that's the story .. the photo I remember showed more of the guy (bald head, no shirt?) and less of the tatoo, but that is definitely the story. Glad to hear my memory is going on me. Very cool.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

Life is short: get busy!

I think I started playing with Perl at the end of 1999. The other day I found one of the first Perl programs I ever wrote.

I'm sure that we've all looked at code we wrote years ago and said to ourselves 'what the hell was I thinking?'. In fact I actually said that out loud when I saw that early program of mine. I think it was good to be reminded of that old code if only to serve as an indicator of how far I've progressed in the last 5 years. I know I've certainly learned a lot in that time and still continue to do so.

Didn't get access to my first Perl book before November 1996, when I bought Camel-II on my employers expense.

Abigail

• Jul 11, 2002 at 01:53 EST

It happens to be the day I started here at the Monastery as well. A cow orker had been telling me how easy it would be to do what I was doing in Korn shell scripts with Perl for a while so I decided to give it a shot. Turns out, the cow orker didn't know the first thing about Perl and was just spouting off at the mouth. I guess it was fortunate I was frustrated enough to listen to him.

Many of the monks here have watched me "grow up". Most of them would say I still have a lot of growing left to do. I still don't consider myself a "programmer", but I sure do love to program.

You started on my 23rd birthday. Just in case you wanted to know another random fact. ;)


One4k4 - perlmonks@poorheart.com (www.poorheart.com)

Unfortunately, I only used Perl for a year and stopped, until June 2000. Every job since has involved Perl intimately, and I've loved it.

I originally learned Perl in 1996.

I was writing an e-commerce system and needed a mock server to test the C client with. I'd heard of people using Perl for IPC apps, and a quick look at the man pages convinced me that it would be quicker to mock it in Perl than it would in C. One Pink camel book later (I was using Perl 4 and didn't know about Perl 5) and Bob's your mother's brother.

Curiously enough since Perl did the job the mock-server evolved into the full server and did several sterling years service before it was eventually rewritten in C by my successor.

4 January 2003 - Got given a copy of "Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days"
26 January 2003 - Bought "Perl for Dummies"
9 June 2003 - Got introduced to Perl Monks and after some great help I felt confident enough to try "Teach Youself Perl ....." again.

%My_Perl = (
 1 => "Learning Perl",
 2 => "Mastering Regular Expression"
 3 => "Programming Perl",
 4 => "Perl for system Administration",
 now => "Web Client programming with Perl",
 next => "Mastering Algorithms with Perl",
 future => "Work with Perl...every day (this is not a book, it's a des
+ire)"
);
[download]

I said 5-8 years, but my first introduction was in a Unix course in 1995. I wrote the one required program in the language, then basically put it out of my head, still trying to get a grasp on other *nix admistratia (and *nix generalia).

In the spring of 1997, I was taking a systems programming course, trying to pass the last of my CS classes to try to graduate soon, and having a rough time of it. My C skills were kind of weak (at the time I was better in Pascal, although not that great in either), so two of my required programs to that point had not done so well. My professor (bless $her) had stated that we could write our programs in any language that was available on the school's main computer system (a VAX minicomputer, iirc), and expressed her concern about my recent programs after giving us the third of our (five proposed) major assignments, which would be due after returning from spring break. While trying to figure out what to do and trying to find what programming languages were available on the school's system by browsing its help system, I ran across a reference to perl, which I had also noticed on my linux system. Remembering a little about the language from the earlier course, I went to the school's library and checked out the only (iirc) book (Perl by Example) they had on the language at the time, renewed it just before going on spring break, and used it over the break to write the macro processor that was the third assignment (which helped me to pass the class, required for my degree).

After that, I started using it more and more, especially as I realized how useful it was to me for doing system administration tasks, and was one of the few to use it in computer programming contest held by the school's computer club in the fall (including on a macro processor-like problem, which I was the first to complete successfully). Later, at my first job out of college, I used it to write a program to import user accounts for personal websites into a *nix-based server, then for more administration tasks. At my prior job, I used it heavily for administrative tasks, and while there found and became a part of this site. My current job was my first where coding was my primary task, and I've been lucky to have gotten to work primarily in and with perl.

So to all those who helped make perl, this site, and even me what we are today, my most heartfelt and sincerest thanks.

Why did I learn Perl? Because my school personal web site's "search engine" consisted of a textarea whose contents were emailed to me when the user clicked the "submit" button. I would then email them back telling them what pages were good for the content they were looking for. (Yecch.) So I learned Perl so I could write a search engine-type thing.

That summer, I got a job at my high school writing admin scripts in Perl. I took off from there.

I learned Perl sitting at Barnes & Noble reading the camel because I had no money to buy it; I didn't need a terminal near me to test things... I absorbed Perl pretty easily. Now, I believe I have somewhere around 10 Perl books.

The answer, sad but true, is not long enough...

I had a look at some perl programs and smaller scripts here and then ever since I started to use linux at home in 1994, and despised the language as an optical nightmare, using bash and the normal unix toolchain and later python instead.

After biting in the (apparently) sour apple and choosing slashcode as base for a community site planned for one of our customers two years ago, I finaly had to use and lern perl...(mind you, it was my decision :-)

I never looked back, it's as simple as that; I do everything I possibly can justify in a java-warehouse in perl nowadays (everything thats system-administration, and a lot of data-im/ex-porting stuff).

With a bit of time at my hands, I'll go and write a small tool for my wife, to help her manage her pupils and their grades; it's almost finished in my head, just by regularly reading perlmonks I know the modules I need, and a few of their respective pitfalls; Besides the beauty of perl I now do see, perlmonks is a real assett to perl.

Thanks ;)

1-3yrs -------
2-5yrs ------------

Is that a trick question for the intermediate Perl user?

cLive ;-)

Well, I haven't voted yet, but had I voted, it'd have to be >15 years, because it wasn't "sort of" my idea. :-)

I re-discovered Perl by being given a large (4000+ installation, for a major auto manufacturer) Windows SQL database application to support. It had originally been written to run on Unix, then ported to Windows, and a lot of the support scripts were written in Perl. I wrote a couple of new ones, and was surprised at how easy and robust it was.

Since then I've been using Perl as a tool language while doing my main work in other languages. I've made colossal time savings by writing scripts for my colleagues to use that make the job easier.

(This comment blatently and shamlessesly ripped off from P.G. Wodehouse's Uncle Fred.)

need ideas on stuff to do with Perl.

Write a full-featured operating system and GUI and suite of applications entirely in Perl -- something complete enough to replace Linux and Gnome. I'll help you beta test it for free. HTH.HAND

---

;$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}} split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$;[-1]->();print

I think that I'll pass on that and go about doing some EXIF tag parsing.

From: Jonadab the Unsightly One <jonadab@bright.net>
X-RS-Flags: 0,0,1,1,0,0,0
X-RS-Sigset: -1
To: whee@mukappa.mknet.org
Subject: bye
Reply-to: jonadab@bright.net
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-transfer-encoding: 8BIT
Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 20:47:30 -0400

I just got the camel book on ILL; going into grue
mode; see you in fourteen days.
[download]

Well before the end of the two-week loan period I ordered my own copy of the book. By then I was writing code that I'd consider embarrasingly bad today, but at the time it did what I wanted. I'd never learned a language that quickly before. The rest is history.

perl -e 'while(<>) {
   if(m/y/&&m/u/&&m/o/&&m/i/&&m/a/&&m/e/){ s/'\''`//;push(@a,$_);}
}
print sort{length($a)<=>length($b)||$a cmp $b;}@a'
 

I began in Perl sometime around 1996, trying to modify some script I found on the web. Those were my first attempts at web coding. Before that I was into Pascal programming.

Perl was love at first sight, although it marked my way into web programming which I don't love that much. I'm still hopeful I can be coding something else soon or after, always in Perl of course. ;-)

Thanks PerlMonks for being such a great community!

Michele.

351169

I've been tattoed to Perl since it was offered as a special problems course in college 4yrs ago (I'm glad I took it, nice vacation from c++). The book used was to "teach yourself Perl in 21 days".

Since then I have most of the Perl stable.

learning Perl
programming Perl
learning Perl on win32 systems
Perl for system administration
mastering Perl expressions
Perl cookbook
network programming with Perl
data munging with Perl
win32 Perl scripting

Thanks, Larry, Damian, Tom, Randal, and all the others.

Good luck with those non-trivial perl modules. Perl and C go quite well hand in hand, thanks to XS, and well, of course you have to wonder what Perl might have been written in....

I've been using for the past year or so. I've tried to quit, honestly. In and out of rehab. It's been a terrible year. I don't know what to do. My wife wants a divorce, the kids want to disown me....Hey, wait.....this isn't the oxycontin abusers page??

Ooops.

Anyway, I didn't really start coding in perl right away. I had one of Matt Wright's script - formmail.pl - and got it to work with some minor changes, mainly configuration changes.

But I wasn't confident I could handle perl. I looked at some parts of the script and said to myself - I don't think I'll ever know what that is doing! Btw, programming was the last thing I would dream of doing, because I never had any formal education in it.

I then got acquinated with more free scripts from the Net and started playing with them. I guess that sort of started my journey...

It was a small step here and a small step there. I started with small scripts to parse text files. When these worked, my confidence grew. Sure the code sucks but it works :)

I've read the 3rd Edition of Perl Programming probably 5-7 times. I never really finished the book - I think I stopped somewhere in the middle. Each time I read, certain concepts that seemed hard to grasp at first became clearer so the reading also became more enjoyable...

Then I discovered perlmonks. This place makes all the difference to my perl experience. I learned new and better ways of doing things over the years. Gradually, I grew more comfortable with perl and what appeared impossible to do at the beginning now becomes doable :)

Great thanks to all who make this community possible and of course, zillion thanks to perl's creator Larry Wall and all who gave life to perl.