[Oc-pm] intro

[Wilson, Douglas]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Forrest Chang [mailto:fkchang2000 at yahoo.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 3:03 PM
> 
>   I've been on the list for a few months and I haven't
> been able to make pizza meeting.

We haven't had regular meetings for awhile now, so you haven't
missed much :) I aim to change that, but probably not until
next year, which really isn't that far away :-)

I've temporarily put a sloppy update on the oc.pm.org page to
that effect. I'll be cleaning up that page and bringing it up
to date as soon as I can.

>   I'm curious as to what the various users are doing
> with perl, what they're development environment/target
> platforms are.  

At work, our main products are in Informix 4GL (character based
screen app) and Centura SqlWindows (GUI - like VB or Powerbuilder),
but I manage to write utilities on both Unix and Windows to do
various things like generating some tedious to write 4GL,
managing patches to our source code (since
we don't use version control on the 4GL and the version
control on the Centura code, well, sucks :). Also any
complicated database data fixing that can't be done in
one SQL statement I do in perl. And in my spare time, I
fiddle with Tk and Wx. I've tried to learn emacs, but
I've been too productive with vi for too long, and I'm
still finding out neat things that vim can do.

I'm not currently doing any web-based programming, though I
have done that in the past, and at one employer, I had
the wonderful opportunity to write 30 or 40 database
loading routines (mostly from fixed-length format files),
after which I took over and rewrote the Parse::FixedLength
module which I used to write a few more data loading
routines.