My only real forays with Perl in anger was back with the original camel book and Perl 4. The secret sauce was the ability to persist the associative arrays to a

My only real forays with Perl in anger was back with the original camel book and Perl 4. The secret sauce was the ability to persist the associative arrays to a dbm file. Even though I worked on a lot of Unix boxes doing assorted data processing, Perl was never my goto for the same reason I adopted vi instead of eMacs. As good as it was, it didn’t come stock on my clients machines, and I could not presume to install it or count on it being there. So, the litany of classic Unix tools prevailed and I simply became adept at working with those. My few temptations to dip my toes in the modern (at the time) Perl waters just found indecipherable source code (to my ignorant eyes) and disastrous attempts to get whatever it was I was dabbling with out of CPAN. I was never very successful with it.