-Throughout my career I've straddled the divide between system administration and programming. My first jobs tasked me with maintaining various sorts of computers: desktop PCs, UNIX-based machines, and backing up the occasional VAX machine. It wasn't until one of my positions needed a website that my career started adding more programming to my resume. Programming websites taught me Perl, SQL, databases, and HTML. The web was so new that folks on our projects were all learning at the same time. I leveraged my Perl knowledge into several jobs doing web-based programming. Perl is a language that was easy to learn but could become very complex. Perl and CGI made it easy to get something onto a web page. Where Perl becomes complex is the syntax for things like regular expressions, and the tendency for Perl programmers to value code that does multiple actions on the same line. The Perl community also valued code that was clever, which lead me to wonder on several occasions if I was clever enough to be a Perl programmer.
+Throughout my career I've straddled the divide between system administration and programming. My first jobs tasked me with maintaining various sorts of computers: desktop PCs, UNIX-based machines, and backing up the occasional VAX machine. It wasn't until one of my positions needed a website that my career added more programming to my resume. Programming websites in the 1990s taught me Perl, SQL, databases, and HTML. The web was so new in the 1990s that all of the folks on our projects were learning at the same time. I leveraged my Perl knowledge into several other jobs and projects doing web-based programming. Perl in the 1990s was a language where the basics were simple to learn but the language could handle really complex ideas and data structures. Perl and CGI made it easy to get something onto a web page that had some interactivity. Where Perl becomes complex is the syntax for things like regular expressions, and the tendency for Perl programmers to value code that does multiple actions on the same line. The Perl community also valued code that was clever, which lead me to wonder on several occasions if I was clever enough to be a Perl programmer.