My first experience with Perl was back in 1999. I was fresh out of university working at a dot-com start-up web agency and was asked to take ownership of a proj

My first experience with Perl was back in 1999. I was fresh out of university working at a dot-com start-up web agency and was asked to take ownership of a project after the developer had left the company. It was pretty straightforward CGI project, with some functions that aligned one-to-one with the database tables. Quite clean code. I made the changes I needed to make easily enough for the first couple of bug fixes or features. But then I had to change the code behind a different database table and the function that backed it did not exist in the codebase. I found the code that called the function, but the function definition itself was nowhere. I was literally stumped and spent hours thinking our versioning system (Source Safe) had failed, or that I had been given the wrong codebase or that there was some library being called into, to no avail. (We were using TextPad back then, no IDE.) And then I found it: AUTOLOAD. If you're not familiar, if you call a function that does not exist in Perl, then Perl will call a sub-routine called AUTOLOAD if you define one. In there you can do whatever you want and the developer who had written this particular system was parsing the function name to identify the database table and fields. So something like `set_customer_name` would set the `name` column of the `customer` table. It was both genius and horrifying.