After two full days on-the-job in my new position, I can say the following:
If you put part of your Perl script in the wrong place relative to the rest of it, the data really gets screwed up.
Perl also does not like it when you leave the semicolon off the end of certain lines. Or forget to backslash certain characters in a regular expression. Or lose track of how many curly braces you have open. I do those things a lot, meaning that I'm learning to find those mistakes very quickly.
There's a lot of road between $(+,2,3), which equals 5 in DIESEL, and other things beginning with $ that make important stuff happen... some of which I understand, and some of which is playing rather coy with me just now.
When everything works as intended and the markup gets properly converted, the victory experience compares to having climbed past a very difficult stretch of rock wall. Or winning at cards (oh, wait... have I ever done that?)
However steep the learning curve, and despite long stretches of staring at the screen trying to figure out why something doesn't work, I haven't regretted taking the position at all. I like this.
And... at least when computer languages get difficult to deal with, I know they remain logical. I'll let those who know what I used to do figure the flip side out :) although ninety-nine percent of the time I liked that too.
Anyway, I heard a funny computer joke the other day, which I never would have understood before. Apparently in binary, which uses only ones and zeroes, the number two is written one-zero, or 10. The mathematical convolutions necessary to get 10 to mean "two" have me positively kerflummoxed, but that aside: "There are only ten types of people in this world--those who understand binary, and those who don't."
BWAAAHAHAHA...
P.S. Have I always had Briana's link spelled "Photograpy"? Sheesh! I think I'll fix that now.
Funny, 'cuz I just finished the first 2 days in a new job myself :-)
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