Perl was my first programming language love. While we've largely gone our separate ways, we still keep in touch and occasionally we still spend some time togeth

Perl was my first programming language love. While we've largely gone our separate ways, we still keep in touch and occasionally we still spend some time together. One such case is adhoc small scripts mid pipeline. There's just certain Perl syntax that's so deeply embedded in me that no matter how much I try to learn sed/awk/tr, I can't help but reach out to my old love in times of weakness and need. I just know how to talk to Perl in the most intimate of ways that's been hard to reproduce in other languages. I still feel a little like I've betrayed Perl a bit every time I use Python. Perl, Larry Wall, Randal Schwartz, Tom Christiansen, brian d foy, O'Reilly, and the many other participants of comp.lang.perl.* had such a lasting influence on my programming career. I wouldn't be who I am today as a programmer without having experienced all the Perl community put out into the world.