I actually wrote my first Perl program when I was working for a company owned and operated by Texas Instruments. That was in 1997. However my job hardly revolved around Perl and I mostly wrote code in Tcl/Tk, C and a small amount of C++. It was in 2000 that I moved to San Mateo, California to work for a startup company named Zack Networks (deceased) that I began writing Perl code for a living. Over the last ten years I have written PHP, C, Python, and (a very small amount of) Java code. However the lion's share of what I have written has been in Perl.

I wonder how long my 'relationship' with Perl can last. Some say that Perl is losing its edge or losing its mindshare. Others think that Perl 6 will revolutionize and reinvigorate what they see as a community stuck in a rut. Maybe. Maybe not. Frankly I'm impressed that it has lasted this long. I'm not impressed because I think Perl is a poor product, but because I think the pace of technological change can be so swift that once mighty technologies are suddenly obsolete (I will concede that this tends to happen more slowly to programming languages). I don't know if my next 10 years will include Perl as much as this past 10 years, but I certainly hope that it does.