There's a current in human affairs to be sure. By 2000 it had just about washed Perl as far east as Memphis, where it became the first language in which I considered myself to be doing "real programming," and not long after the springboard into the first 20 years of an engineering career whose last 20 look likely to embody a role Tim Leary might have purported to recognize. (The last time having a genuine conversation with a computer was really part of the public vernacular, so was he, of course! Wrong about everything as always, but sometimes provocatively so.)

I'm not sorry to have stopped working in Perl, broken cups or no; thinking back on my time with it puts me forcibly in mind of what I believe to have been Wirth's comments on the hazards of early exposure to BASIC, and "The Rails' Progress" in the late 2000s and after I would nominate as the corresponding farce.