One of my earliest jobs while still in high school was working for a laser printing and microfiche shop. We got all kinds of tapes from customers in all sorts o

One of my earliest jobs while still in high school was working for a laser printing and microfiche shop. We got all kinds of tapes from customers in all sorts of formats so I built a skillset of parsing and manipulating data in the tools available which were Snobol, PL/1 and Fortran. Lol. Later after devouring the dragon book and learning YACC and so on it was hella fun to write parsers in 'C' for my new employer. In fact I got a contract to do some data munging for a gas pipeline because their processes needed some serious help, and that's when I discovered PERL. Larry Wall's reporting language turned me into a super hero because although I was already fast dealing with data, PERL meant I could turn around any request in a few hours. It was (and still is) amazing.