Nay, it is God. Coupled with the usual unix shell commands, a bit of awk and a dash of sed, there’s no limit to what you can do with perl. I’ve been dabbling around with the scripting language for years, but when they landed me at the client site (which at times can be like sitting next to the mega-ton class bomb you helped build), I had to apply it in earnest.
So the PM asks me to fish out some trades that meet a very specific set of criteria from our text records. This of course, is in the aftermath of yesterday’s tumble in the US markets. The conditions are distributed among many multi-gigabyte files and I open my mouth to say “impossible” with a Dilbert-esque wave of my hand but I end up saying “very very difficult”. She says to give it a shot and I dive into the scripting. Three hours, 300 lines of perl later I have it. And I do my “I feel good, ta da da da da da da, I feeeeel good…” song and dance, which I do in place on my seat. Those who have seen it would tell you what a rare sight this is. That just lightened up an otherwise gloomy day. Now I’m not even going to look at my C++ until I know it can’t be done in perl.
*sigh* been there. Heck, I still am there. Perl gets no respect in the C++ biased world though.
Maybe that’s because Perl looks scary to people who’ve gotten used to strongly-typed, function-based languages.
Things like open(FILE,”<$file”) and $line = <FILE> make some people nervous.