brian d'foy asks people to submit answers/comments to above topic. Here's my take:
- The person who introduced me to Perl showed me that... No one person introduced me to Perl. I was attempting to install a manufacturing package using the Unify RDBMS and was finding the C API hair-tearingly difficult to use. A developer for the package mentioned there was a new language called Perl and there was Unify-Perl available. (This was in 1990.)
- I first started using Perl to... talk to a Unify RDBMS.
- I kept using Perl because... Perl did garbage collection and I'd spent 15 years fighting C's malloc and free. I didn't do anything but manage memory for my C programs and Perl came along and I suddenly had 90% more time to write real code, not manage memory.
- I can't stop thinking about Perl... because the syntax seems to align with how my ideas form (or maybe my thinking is now so warped towards Perl I can't think any other way).
- I'm still using Perl because... I haven't found anything sufficiently compelling in other languages to make me want to switch. I spent a few months wrangling Python for a living but felt only relief when I was able to switch back to Perl.
- I get other people to use Perl by... teaching in-house courses, always being ready to answer any questions about Perl wherever I work, writing new apps in Perl if language is not specified.
- I also program in ... Python and ... JavaScript, but I like Perl better as... I can write whole solutions to problems in a few lines in Perl. (Ever tried writing a 'one-liner' in Python? It ain't pretty :-)
