Having managed to dodge Perl for the first 16 years of his professional life, somehow, in 2014 [sic], it creeps up and takes him down. "Just when I thought I was out..."

From Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes:

Perl has no boolean data type. A scalar in an if statement evaluates to boolean "false" if and only if it is one of the following:

undef
number 0
string ""
string "0".

The Perl documentation repeatedly claims that functions return "true" or "false" values in certain situations. In practice, when a function is claimed to return "true" it usually returns 1, and when it is claimed to return false it usually returns the empty string, "".

RLY Perl? You return truth and falsity with two different paradigms? `string "0"` is *false*?

We're not getting off on the right foot. And I thought I'd unfairly disliked you for all these years.


Backstory:

Third party to direct client and me (and a few others):

I'd like to engage [mfn author] and have him work the actual deployment there. He can also help us troubleshoot scripting issues that arise when the scripts run and work directly with [Perl guy] here. How is [mfn author's] Perl scripting?

My reply to direct client:

> How is his Perl scripting?

Unfortunately nonexistent.

"Unfortunately" said not wholly without jest, unfortunately.

Direct client says:

Oh, I am sure you will be great at it. :)

;^D And with that, we start installing Strawberry Perl and reading free intro books. YAY.

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