Grokking OO Perl
I've landed a contract programming gig. One of the guys I'm working with is fresh out of college with a CS degree. He seems to be a pretty good programmer, but inexperience and haste showed in the perl cgis he'd hacked together. On Thursday afternoon I gave him a quick explanation of how to do objects in Perl. He went home and spent four hours rewriting his CGIs into objects.
Three years ago at this time I couldn't figure out how to apply OO Perl to my own projects. Partly, my one-shot data munjings didn't really need objects. I knew how to use modules slurped from CPAN and I understood the syntax, and inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism and so on. I understood but I didn't grok.
Sometime between then and Thursday I grokked.
It tickles me to think that two years of Java and five months of occasional python hacking have helped me grok OO Perl. Maybe I shouldn't be publicly bragging about it. :-) It's also fun to have a paid perl gig.