Why Perl...

/via http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2018/06/22/are-you-any-good-at-it/

I still remember discovering perl back in 1991. I was one of two Unix Guys at Notre Dame back then, and we were responsible for managing a metric ton of SPARCstations, AFS, remote booting, and all sorts of weird-ass s**t that, luckily, most of us just don’t have to worry about anymore.
And yeah, so much of everything was run using a cobbled together collection of csh (bash wasn’t huge back then).

Perl was a godsend, simplifying so much of the nasty text processing that was intrinsic to the sysadmin stuff we used to do back then. Mind you, most of this was because it beat the pants off of csh, and that was good enough for us!

Years went by, and perl just became a core part of my toolkit — to the point that we pretty much ran a telco for over 10 years with most of the management/automation (what we’d call DevOps these days!) done in perl, and it worked.

Infrastructure tooling is so much better these days, what with all the Continuous Delivery toolkits out there, that I’ve pretty much dropped off of perl for most things. That said, I still do pull it out for an occasional one-liner when I need to do some quick and dirty text processing — I guess old habits do die hard!