I’ve long been a command-line nerd. It was, after all, my first computer interface starting with Apple II’s in school and DOS at home when my mother bought our first computer when I was 10. While I was fascinated by graphical interfaces when I first encountered them, text-based interfaces continued to hold a certain mystique especially as I became familiar with the UNIX shell through my early experiences with Linux based systems when I was in my teens.

I recently came accross something approximating the following in a client’s code base.

It seems these days that I often find myself in the position of one of the elder programmers in team settings. This is unsettling for a variety of reasons, one of the more obvious being that I’m just over 40, and one of the most troubling being that there’s still so much to learn. However, I do find that there’s some perspective that comes from being involved in the same industry for a while (27 years or so now—time waits for no one), and perspective, I’ve found, is always valuable. I often hear folks waxing nostalgic about PHP or the early days of JavaScript, but I hear very little about the wonder of a language that PHP and JavaScript, warts and all, could never have come to be without. That language is Perl. To understand its significance we have to do a little time traveling, but before we do that let’s talk a little about programming.