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> Perl, more than any other language I know, sacrifices nearly every other property in the name of being useful. Another factor that mattered back during Perl'

> Perl, more than any other language I know, sacrifices nearly every other property in the name of being useful. Another factor that mattered back during Perl's heyday was the insane lengths it went to for maximum portability. The Perl porters shouldered the burden of making it run on DOS/Windows, Mac OS, VMS, and all the weird Unices that existed at the time. This doesn't matter as much nowadays, but it was crucial back then. If you had a text-munging or scripting problem, and wanted to solve it once and for all, Perl was the perfect tool.

krylon 11y ago
Oh yes. The Perl documentations comes with things like perlos400 or perlvms that details the specific problems or advantages people looking to run Perl on that particular platform will face, and the list of these OS-specific documents is really impressive. There are systems on it that run Perl that I have never heard of (or only in whispering, at a New Moon). Perl lets you pretend that Windows know how to fork. That alone still amazes me in a way. During my training, I had to set up BIND 9 on IBM mainframes running z/OS and configure TSIG (cryptographically verified zone transfers), which among other things required changing the (shared) keys on a regular basis (about once per month, I think) and distributing them across about half a dozen systems. Fortunately, at that precise point in time, I stumble across a news headline that IBM just released Perl 5.8 for z/OS and managed to get the sysprog to install it. The alternative would have been REXX. I looked at it, quickly, and then looked away, very determinedly. I was really glad Perl was available on those machines.
ribasushi 11y ago
FWIW perl currently builds and passes tests on z/OS, under straight EBCDIC: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2015/11/msg232907.html http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2015/11/ms...
- username223 11y ago
  And this is why Perl is awesome: IBM mainframes are the opposite of sexy, but some people use them, and Perl will work there.

krylon 11y ago

Oh yes. The Perl documentations comes with things like perlos400 or perlvms that details the specific problems or advantages people looking to run Perl on that particular platform will face, and the list of these OS-specific documents is really impressive. There are systems on it that run Perl that I have never heard of (or only in whispering, at a New Moon). Perl lets you pretend that Windows know how to fork. That alone still amazes me in a way. During my training, I had to set up BIND 9 on IBM mainframes running z/OS and configure TSIG (cryptographically verified zone transfers), which among other things required changing the (shared) keys on a regular basis (about once per month, I think) and distributing them across about half a dozen systems. Fortunately, at that precise point in time, I stumble across a news headline that IBM just released Perl 5.8 for z/OS and managed to get the sysprog to install it. The alternative would have been REXX. I looked at it, quickly, and then looked away, very determinedly. I was really glad Perl was available on those machines.

ribasushi 11y ago

FWIW perl currently builds and passes tests on z/OS, under straight EBCDIC: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2015/11/msg232907.html http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2015/11/ms...

username223 11y ago
And this is why Perl is awesome: IBM mainframes are the opposite of sexy, but some people use them, and Perl will work there.