Perl made me a better C++ programmer

I continue to work in C++. The assignment these past few weeks has been made easier by my experience with Perl, specifically the lists and hashes that Perl offers. Now that I can use the STL collections in C++, my experience with Perl collections pays off. The challenge at the office was solved quite readily with a few STL collections. In the "bad old days", I would have created classes in C++. With the STL, I can use the vectors, deques, and maps with little effort.

I credit Perl for two reasons: it has these classes, and it takes effort to create your own classes -- more effort than C++ (at least for me). When working with Perl, I was pretty much forced to learn the collection classes. They gave me a different perspective on programming and the organization of data. Those perspectives carry over to the C++/STL world.