Being tempted to the dark side

That sounds suspiciously like I’m off to join a competitor. But no, actually what I mean by the dark side is scripting and tools. Quite a lot of the tools that are knocked up in my department to perform tedious tasks are scripted using Perl. As part of my architecting duties, I’m needing to use one of these scripts to see how many of our topics have particular contents. In order to run a Perl script, I have to have Perl installed. (As an aside this is a thing I find annoying, why should I have to install something in order to run something else?)

I used to use Perl about 6/7 years ago when I was working in test, as our testcases and test infrastructure were written using Perl scripts. So I’m thinking, ooo well, I could start dabbling with Perl, maybe knock up some little scripts to make some of the tedious repetitive stuff easier. And this is a good idea, kind of. Except I don’t really have the time, and to be fair I wasn’t that great at Perl anyway!