Perl
For me, learning Perl has been like giving up smoking. In fact, until recently they were even more remarkably similar in that I’d never learned Perl and never given up (or taken up) smoking. But the current similarity is that just as it takes many smokers several serious attempts to quit, it took me several attempts to learn Perl.
I’m not sure was I was ever trying to learn it at all. I think I was still, years later, held in the web of How to become a hacker. I always got caught on the rocks of trying to program Perl with my Python idioms which involve rapidly evolved steep class hierachies and heavy reliance on nested data structures and was quickly dashed up against Perl’s references, or references syntax at least.
This time though I was learning Perl for work, which is like giving up smoking for a partner: an added incentive and a position in which it is difficult to admit failure. I’m sure my Perl looks exactly what a Python programmer’s Perl always looks like too.
PhD
I’m told going overseas makes sense. What kind of sense, I’m yet to determine.