You know, one of the reasons I like Perl so much is that there seems to be no end to what one can do with it. As soon as you muse to yourself “Hmm…wish I could do [whatever],” you stumble across that [whatever] and suddenly it’s a daily part of your Perl arsenal.

In addition, one of the reasons I sometimes hate Perl so much is that there seems to be no end to what one can do with it – which means, in many ways, I constantly feel stoooopid when I work with it.

Regular expression are an example – while not at all unique to Perl, Larry Wall’s language enables you to used them for a plethora of tasks, reducing lines of code to often only one clump of code (clump is a good word; tight Perl often looks like a cat has walked across your keyboard).

Yet the more you want to do with RegEx, the more you have to teach yourself.

In other words, first you have to feel stupid, and then (usually) a breakthrough gives you the payoff.

It can be frustrating, but … that’s also the fun. Yeah, color me geek…