Perl

The camel is used widely to demonstrate that Perl is not the most elegant language around, but also that it is powerful, fast, stable, versatile and able to work under difficult circumstances. Furthermore it is quite easy to learn, and because of Perl large parts of the Internet function well. Tens of thousands of people worldwide work with Perl.

Liz started working with Perl in 1993 for xxLINK and later, in 2000, continued working with Perl for Dijkmat, performing tasks as programming, project management, concept development and system development.

While working at xxLINK, she started the development of a toolkit library in Perl for herself and the other programmers and website developers: LizPerl. Some aspects of LizPerl are obsolete because of other Perl toolkits freely available on the internet, and in other aspects because the developers of Perl added the functionality of several of these modules to the Perl core. But as a whole, they are interesting enough to make the toolkit library open source, one day in the future. Not now, because making something open source costs a lot of time, and working together with interested developers costs a lot of time as well, and even though this is real fun time, this time is not yet available.

She is an active member of the Amsterdam Perl Mongers, a Dutch user community for which she organized several meetings and to which she gave several presentations. In 2001 she was one of the organisers of the Perl conference YAPC Europe 2001 in Amsterdam/Diemen. Afterwards, she co-founded Stichting Perl Promotie Nederland (Foundation for the Promotion of Perl in The Netherlands), of which she was the chair for some time.

She also is active as a Perl Monk, an online international user community. The Perl Monks are very helpful and a good place for beginning Perl users to start gathering wisdom, ask for help with all sorts of practical problems and find (or, later, contribute) to the ever growing amount of small, large and other Perl scripts and programs.

At the first Dutch Perl Workshop she gave a presentation about Parsing XML/HTML (the presentation and the examples used therein are available). Pictures of this event show that Perl programmers are nice people who can have a lot of fun.