"Mox nox in rem!"

Mox Perl (http://mox.perl.com/) was the web site that eventually got me interested in the Perl programming language. The site was maintained by one of the Perl gurus, Tom Christiansen.

The name was obviously pun on Magic: the Gathering card Mox Pearl, one of the coveted mono artifacts.

Mox Perl had one of the most interesting Magic sites. It had a searchable database of Magic cards. What made the search system interesting was that you could search by arbitrary Perl expression. I can't remember how this exactly worked (the tutorial isn't in the Wayback Machine), but you could do searches sort of like $title =~ /wolf/gi. The site had a comprehensive search page, and also AngelGrep to search Stephen D'Angelo's ruling summaries. The whole database and all tools was also downloadable at some point. Pity it's no longer there...

The site was eventually closed. It was very amusing, in a way, that first this site inspired me to learn Perl, and once I thought I had the hang of it, the site was dead. Truly, the site has shown me that apprentices outlive masters.