Digression: How I learned Perl

• I had written (in C) a tricky but widely-appreciated utility, classify

• It would compare a large group of files and tell you which ones were identical

• (I used to to manage config files on a cluster of diskless workstations)

• At 1992 USENIX, I showed it to someone

• He said "Oh, you should have written this in Perl"

• I didn't know Perl, so I couldn't argue with him.

• So I learned Perl in order to prove he was wrong

• But he was right

Next

Next