You stole my story! :)
I was a mediocre developer and student in my CS program and actually considered getting out at a few points. I really loved systems and building solutions though, and I ended up becoming a DBA.
For some reason my mental model resonated with Perl. I was able to use it almost like a writing process, getting my “outline” laid out in Perl and refactoring supplementing with more efficient C code or third party stuff later.
It was cool, i started fixing data integration issues and automating processes around the databases. Eventually a colleague and I basically built an application that made our DR testing failover and failback processes a two-click event. I left that company long ago and I know a bunch of our stuff ran almost 20 years before the system was migrated to AWS.
IT is more industrial and efficient these days. That’s not a bad thing, but I had alot of fun being the kid showing the old people what Linux was and gluing all of these systems to orchestrate them. Unfortunately Perl is an artifact of that era.
I felt the same when I used Python to rewrite some broken/incompatible C code. It didn't save on performance, but it did reignite that hacker mindset with a clear to write language. I show students my Flask sets up and I can see the light bulbs firing off in their brains.
The older languages may be artifacts of our era of code, but I'm excited to see what the next wave of documented prompting vibe coding will bring.
I might finally understand what the heck my students' code is doing HA!