Perl was the first language I learned, because my local books-a-million, in the year 2000, had basically the entire O’Reilly Perl series deeply discounted ($5.99 to $9.99, a steal for a college freshman), and so I learned Perl.

The writing of the O’Reilly Perl books had this micheviousness to them that is also reflected in the language itself. It espoused an apparent simplicity in doing simple things, like reading from a file or taking user input, that languages like C++ had much more ceremony around. Likewise, when I used it to create a compliance test generator for a company I worked for, it took me a few days to write something that would take their source questions and answers and generate an entire website that folks could use to give exams and certifications for regulatory compliance.

To this day, I have not found any other language that makes text processing as easy as it was in Perl, and given how much of our work is processing text and strings, I’m still a little surprised other languages haven’t made it as easy as Perl did.