Sent my VP an honest to god patch today, produced by diff(1). To a Perl program that he wrote. I don't even _know_ Perl.

Best part of my day.

Update: oh no I might be required by an expansion of my job duties to learn Perl

@gnomon Having grown up on Basic, Pascal, assembler and C, I found Perl liberating when I discovered it in the 90s. In Perl, I could do in an hour what would have taken a day in C. And Perl was fun in a way that other languages just weren't. For years, I used it for everything I could.

I eventually became slightly disillusioned with #Perl when I struggled to use it for a medium-sized project (about two dozen classes, several thousand LOC) that had grown over several years, as these things do. Errors that C++ would have found at compile time, Perl didn't murmur about, and I had to debug them as baffling runtime errors. For medium-sized and large programs, I now prefer languages with more structure and BDSM. But Perl is still great for whipping up small-to-medium programs in double-quick time — things that wouldn't be worth writing if all I had was C++.

Modern Perl 5 has some facilities that Perl didn't have when I was using it in earnest, and I don't think anyone should be afraid (or ashamed) of using it. But you will need to bite the bullet, if you haven't already done so, and get comfortable with regular expressions. Regexes are one of Perl's superpowers.

If they ever deliver a usable #Raku, I'll be fascinated to try it, because it adds the structure and BDSM that Perl 5 is missing.