As a part of the Planet Perl Iron Man Blogging Competition, Graeme Lawton asks the question: How did you get hooked? What better time to tell the story of my love affair with Perl, than now!

To be totally truthful, I didn’t pick Perl, Perl picked me! In university, I took one class where we learned a little Perl, but the rest of the time it was heavy Java, some C/C++, and some Lisp of all things! It wasn’t until I got out into the working word that Perl got its hold on me.

I struggled to get that first job out of university. My resume was rather un-standard, with far more soft skills gained from my experience than technical skills, and a Philosophy degree to throw everyone for a loop. I was so grateful to get the job that I finally got: Web Programmer at a leads generation and sales company. The main language used there was perl, under mod_perl, so I had to get crackin’ and learn on the job. A year an a half later I’d left that company, but I couldn’t part with my Perl! I found another Perl programming job, and then another. I also started up this little thing called List Central using Perl under mod_perl.

Reasons I love Perl:

• !,@,$,%,&
  • Unlike the general sentiment of the ruby/python people, I love the funny symbols used in Perl. Once you get to know what they signify all quickly convey their meaning, and it’s easy to speed up the rate of development, because you know what you are dealing with.
• Flexibility
  • The flexibility of Perl is huge for me! I’m not big on the Perl one-liners that Perl is famous for. I like that I don’t have to be all cutesie and smartie pants showing off how few lines I can complete a task in. I like to be verbose and include all of my braces, and with Perl I can! And those that like the one-liners, they can enjoy their way too!
• CPAN
  • CPAN is super useful. One of the most comprehensive and well documented libraries available in any language. And it’s all open source. A beautiful example of the power of open source!
• Objects or Scripts
  
  • Again, this is part of the whole flexibility thing. Perl is capable of quick and dirty scripts as well as massive projects designed with proper object orientation. With Perl, the developer gets to decide!

How did you get into Perl? Why do you love it?

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