Why I'm Passionate about Perl
I saw this meme on Grant's journal (huh, who keeps a journal these days, I knew he was old fashioned). Not sure where he got it from but I thought I'd do it anyway.
Erm, nothing. I was the same as Grant. I introduced myself to Perl and I'm glad I did. At the time, I was living in Germany, had a crappy old laptop, no webbernets and lots of time. I had to do something and somehow, Perl won.
I first starting using Perl to...
...do my own photo gallery website. And yes, I wrote my own templating language. I love the fact that I did it and I think by doing so, my passage towards being a true Perl programmer was complete. TMTOWTDI! It's my party and I'll cry if I want to.
I kept using Perl because...
...after only a few days, I was connecting to The Gimp and writing Perl-Fu modules to generate the graphics, the thumbnails and all the buttons on the site (duly swapped with onMouseOver and onMouseOut). The fact that this language was reading in XML, writing out HTML, reading in jpgs, writing out lots of other images and all these other things made me think that this language was special. At the time, I just didn't know that it wasn't a language at all, and instead was an addictive kind of glue, dressed up and disguised as a language.
I can't stop thinking about Perl...
...because it just encompasses everything I believe in. It has power, expressiveness, individuality, schizophrenia and duct tape (lots of it). It's also free and it has a great community, which are both hugely important factors.
I'm still using Perl because...
...I haven't yet found anything better than it. I'm afraid it's that simple. Other scripting languages don't seem worthwhile enough (or different enough) to spend time on and it's only completely new paradigms like Erlang, which I would consider learning. Whilst a lot of Perl people are saying "Ruby until Perl 6", I'm saying "Perl until Perl 6".
I get other people to use Perl by...
N/A. I don't say to other people that they should do anything. Then again, there's no harm trying to convince someone to use something by showing them it's better. I mean, show them a thousand line Java file or a 10 line Perl program. Also show them ACME::EyeDrops and say "There, you do that". If they reply with "Why would I want to?", you've just won the "Which is more fun?" argument.
I also program in ... and ..., but I like Perl better since...
...as stated before, I've not found a better language, though in the past I have written stuff in C, C++, Ruby, Java, Ada 83 (Ravenscar Profile) and a few other bits and pieces. To be honest, waiting for stuff to compile just bores me to tears. It used to take me a thousand hours to get an Ada program to compile and once it compiled, there was no point running it since I knew it would work! Perl is a refreshing change :-)
This post originated on http://chilts.org/.
Email me on andychilton -at- gmail -dot- com.