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Ah Perl, the Swiss Army Chainsaw.

My first big kid job was taking over ownership of a Perl-based Oracle-backed data warehouse. Mostly it was SQL queries wrapped up with a Perl script executed by cron that output excel workbooks or csvs and emailed or dumped to a file server.

Most of the pivots and reporting tables were actually generated in Perl because it was just nicer to work with than Excel.

It was wonderful, I learned so much, mostly how to love Perl and CPAN.

We merged our telco billing system with our new parent company with some Perl, cron, a couple SQL queries and an FTP server.

I have said it for years and I will continue to repeat. If you could snap your fingers and delete all the Perl code in the world your lights would turn off.



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