He thought himself how to write Perl in a week. And then started coding. He wrote a script to automate a very tedious testing process so perfectly, we were able to reduce our test team by like 70% and test more precisely than before.
It was fully procedural code. And it looked monstrous. Our architect challenged him that it won't workout. He even challenged to rewrite it in Java, but that project never finished. He was never able to ever complete the rewrite.
It motivated me to learn Perl. Since then my life has been totally different. I've done mountains of work alone working, hacking during nights.
I learned the following things from that episode:
1. First write the program.
2. Write the correct program.
3. Write the program to run fast and efficient(scalability and all that)
4. Beautify the program.
But most people never cross 2)- The point is there are tons of people who can do this tasks related to micro optimization. The people who win in a ordinary work environment are ones who know the art of converting ideas to sell able products in the fastest way possible.
By the way that manager also wrote database clients in C++ which helped us troubleshoot our in memory databases from remote locations. Again the architect challenged to get it done Java, as before the project never completed :)
Its a fact that majority of the software world is hacked and held in existence with tools like Perl and Php. The people who care about artistic elegance are few, they often fail and generally don't matter.