I Heart Perl
This is a geek post…just a warning. 
My senior year of college, I got a job working as a programmer at Car-Part.com. This was my first “real,” career type job. I started out making simple web pages in HTML, but after a couple months, I transitioned to dynamic pages, mainly using Perl and CGI. Though I had several programming languages under my belt at that point, this was my first exposure to Perl…and I quickly fell in love. I liked it so much better than Pascal, C++ and the other languages that I had worked with.
Since leaving Car-Part, I haven’t worked much with Perl. At my current job, I use SAS - not too bad, but definitely not my favorite language. However, over the past couple weeks, I’ve wanted to write some administrative/batch programs to make some of the departments tasks more efficient and automatic. So I turned to my good friend Perl - and realized just how much I’ve missed it. So I did some research and found ways that I can mix Perl and SAS. That made me day!
Just thought I’d share my joy.
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Jan 10th, 2008 at 08:08:52
Ah, Perl. Larry’s language…
Probably the best SwissArmyKnife language out there! I’ve grown to like Ruby better (and it’s getting most of the press these days), but there’s nothing like a 10 line Perl script, written in 10 minutes that saves you an hour of work per day.
Jan 10th, 2008 at 21:24:35
And it takes the junior level programmer who has to modify it three days to comprehend!
Jan 11th, 2008 at 07:28:54
It’s all got to be better than JCL, APS, and COBOL. Actually, I can’t complain. It’s really not that bad!
Jan 11th, 2008 at 08:12:42
COBOL is awful. I had a class on it in undergrad and that was plenty for me.
What fun is Perl if it’s not obfuscated and confounds anyone who tries to look at it
Jan 11th, 2008 at 13:30:26
Thanks for the Geek post, that reminds me that I really don’t care to learn anymore about programming at least not at this point. Though there are times, that I wish I could easily throw together a program for something cool like my contact database. But then I remember how much I dislike programming.
Glad some people enjoy though.
Jan 14th, 2008 at 17:35:08
I think if you build that contact management tool you’ll probably be re-inventing the wheel big-time. If nothing else, put it in Access and you’ll have your front and back-end there together.
Jan 14th, 2008 at 22:48:44
Sourceforge.net can be a good resource. Lots of open source projects, so once you find one that is halfway decent, you can mess with the source code and customize it as you want. Lots of garbage on there, so beware, but there are some gems as well.