New Year New Job New State
==========================

It's all new!

New year.
New state.      (the other side of the USA)
New job.
New home.
New computer.   (hard to bring a desktop on the plane!)
New car.        (rental)

And heck, since they're a Perl shop at work, I'm taking a whole
NEW look at a language I've hardly touched in at least 15 years.

In fact, I'm really seeing Perl with new eyes.

I was down on Perl for a long time.

Always loved Larry Wall and the Perl community, but the language
just bothered me.

What changed?

I learned UNIX!

Over the last couple years, I've been on a slow, round-about
tour of the standard Unix tools: ed, sed, awk, shell, that sort
of thing.

And wow, does that EVER change a person's perspective of Perl!
Suddenly all of the language's weird and seemingly arbitrary
choices suddenly make sense!

Perl is Unix. A weird,
                     wonderful,
                              documented,
                                        standardized,
                                                    cohesive
                                                           Unix.

And I'll be darned if I'm not liking it quite a bit.

Oh, it's got problems, don't get me wrong.  But compared to 
piecing together shell, awk, and sed - and trying to overcome the
limitations and inconsistancies of each, you really appreciate
how Perl manages to bring together all of the good parts into a
single, universally-installed package and ties it up with a bow.

Do I still want to pursue Nim for everyday scripting?  You bet I
do!

But Perl is going right back to where it belongs on my shelf of
Useful Tools.  I've barely begun relearning it and already I've
written a cool little utility for work.

By the way, a book I've found to be very enlightening for the
"Perl for Unix People" viewpoint is _Minimal Perl_ by Tim Maher
and available in PDF from the publisher, Manning.  It's a weird
book, but just the one I needed at this stage in my life.

Onward and upward, wigglers and danglers!