the perl programming language.
Back when I first entered the working world after graduating college, I picked up Perl as a scripting language. I fell in love with it largely because it was created by a linguist, Larry Wall, and it offered a way of programming that closely matched how my own use of language works.
I cut my teeth automating nearly everything I could in Perl, largely with the help of fellow Perl programmers on Freenode's #perl IRC channel. I even attended meetups in Atlanta with the Atlanta Perl Mongers. I don't think I've participated in any other user groups quite like that.
The tech environment in the late 2000's was different than the one we're in today. People were busy getting stuff done and cryptocurrency, NFTs, and all the fluff we've amassed along the way hadn't quite accreted into the tech environment we know today.
Anyway, Perl is still my favorite programming language, even if it "lost" the scripting language feud it had with Python. Because I've used it so much, I can often put together a Perl script to do most anything without Googling around for syntax or solutions. I think C is the only other programming language I can do that with.
links.
one-liners.
- replace every instance of 'foo' with 'bar' in a given glob of text files:
perl -pi -e 's/foo/bar/g' *.txt - search for 'foo' and replace with 'bar' in the current directory with ack:
ack -l 'foo' | xargs perl -pi -E 's/foo/bar/g' - convert 30 to hex (prints "1E"):
perl -E 'printf("%X\n", 30)'