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Perl was one of the first languages I learned and also the first language I used commercially. I have a huge soft spot for it as a language. Still love Perl regular expressions like no other. I loved the camel book and its various footnotes with both humour and deeper knowledge on a topic.

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Right there with you.

No language even comes close to Perl’s regex support. First class support for regexes as programming tools, and unparalleled speed.

I attended Sun’s road show announcing Java to the world in 1996 (IIRC) and when I asked about regular expression support, I was shocked that it not only didn’t have it built into the language syntax, it wasn’t even available in the library.

As a die-hard Perl fan, that seemed a ridiculous oversight for a language being promoted for Internet programming.

not only didn’t have it built into the language syntax, it wasn’t even available in the library.

Did not know that about the first Java release. That shit is bananas.

The Perl Journal had that flavor too. I hardly ever read it because I had no interest in actually coding Perl, but it was great to see this kind of culture on the magazine rack at Borders or wherever.

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