New Year New Job New State
==========================
It's all new!
New year.
New state. (the other side of the USA)
New job.
New home.
New computer. (hard to bring a desktop on the plane!)
New car. (rental)
And heck, since they're a Perl shop at work, I'm taking a whole
NEW look at a language I've hardly touched in at least 15 years.
In fact, I'm really seeing Perl with new eyes.
I was down on Perl for a long time.
Always loved Larry Wall and the Perl community, but the language
just bothered me.
What changed?
I learned UNIX!
Over the last couple years, I've been on a slow, round-about
tour of the standard Unix tools: ed, sed, awk, shell, that sort
of thing.
And wow, does that EVER change a person's perspective of Perl!
Suddenly all of the language's weird and seemingly arbitrary
choices suddenly make sense!
Perl is Unix. A weird,
wonderful,
documented,
standardized,
cohesive
Unix.
And I'll be darned if I'm not liking it quite a bit.
Oh, it's got problems, don't get me wrong. But compared to
piecing together shell, awk, and sed - and trying to overcome the
limitations and inconsistancies of each, you really appreciate
how Perl manages to bring together all of the good parts into a
single, universally-installed package and ties it up with a bow.
Do I still want to pursue Nim for everyday scripting? You bet I
do!
But Perl is going right back to where it belongs on my shelf of
Useful Tools. I've barely begun relearning it and already I've
written a cool little utility for work.
By the way, a book I've found to be very enlightening for the
"Perl for Unix People" viewpoint is _Minimal Perl_ by Tim Maher
and available in PDF from the publisher, Manning. It's a weird
book, but just the one I needed at this stage in my life.
