Re:Perlsecret – Perl secret operators and constants
by apercu on Thursday January 15, 2026 @10:24AM
(#46633792)
It might be a generational thing.
When I started out as a sysadmin it was all shell and glue and different syntax on the 8 different flavours of *NIX I worked on between '94 and '97, then I found Perl suddenly you could actually build things that felt "real". It took me straight into web application development by '98, and I'm not sure I would have stayed in this field had it not existed (I was also working in neuro-diagnostics at the time and might have stayed there).
I saw some really elegant stuff written in Perl.
I also saw some absolutely unhinged, impossible-to-maintain garbage.
When I started out as a sysadmin it was all shell and glue and different syntax on the 8 different flavours of *NIX I worked on between '94 and '97, then I found Perl suddenly you could actually build things that felt "real". It took me straight into web application development by '98, and I'm not sure I would have stayed in this field had it not existed (I was also working in neuro-diagnostics at the time and might have stayed there).
I saw some really elegant stuff written in Perl.
I also saw some absolutely unhinged, impossible-to-maintain garbage.