Nice! My first big Perl program was an IRC bot named GoatNuts back in '96/'97.

I learned a lot of Perl from Randall Schwarz (Programming Perl, O'Reilly) himself (who was doing community service for 'hacking' intel) in the #perl chanel on EfNet! Later hung out with him at a mutual friends party and he was an absolute asshat. Best lessons from Randall were to use strict; and always run with the -w flag and then heed and fix the warnings. When you can write beautiful strict perl with no warnings the code is much easier to maintain.

Met Larry Wall (author of Perl) at The Perl Conference 1.0 and he was a gem.

If you find you're doing any web scraping look into the obscure spaceship operator. It makes parsing a small piece of larger text so much easier if you have good stop and start points.

Cheers on your journey! Not too many proud perl hackers out there but I made a good chunk of coin off that language and it was my first 'real' language so it has a dear place in my heart!

Have you considered raku? I'm not super familiar with perl but I assumed raku is perl improved

Perl is excellent for text manipulation! I use it time from time when I need to do more advanced text manipulation in bash. perl -ne ‘[code goes here]’ is good for making one liners in bash.

I remember your previous post, congrats on not giving up.

Whipping up a script to solve a very specific problem is super satisfying, but I found that anything you write quickly becomes a liability. Debugging Perl can be super difficult, especially when returning to something you wrote a while back.

Personally I grew tired of the punishment and left it all behind! If I need a quick script I’ll use Python instead, and if it doesn’t work I can use a real debugger to fix it.

In any case it’s always fun learning new things, I hope this experience ends up being useful to you in the future and you get to easily solve a problem that stumps everyone else involved.

Cheers!