Why I Love Perl

I just wrote a complete XML-RSS aggregator that pulls in data from 137 feeds that are in a MySQL table, parses each feed, adds new entries into another MySQL table, and then changes the first table's entries to represent the last fetch time, last processing time (if the feed retrieval was successful), and last update time (if there were new entries added to the other table). I accomplished all this over today while doing other things, likely spending less than three hours on the actual project, including time studying a legacy MySQL table to which I am trying to conform.

That's why I love Perl. I am not someone who just loves to program, but Perl makes things efficient and sensible enough that at least I can get what I need to get working done in as little time as possible. cough Unlike cough PHP cough.

More on just how this fits into yesterday's post later.