21 ms·

Perl and the birth of the dynamic web

14 points by MilnerRoute 10y ago

jlgaddis 10y ago
Wow, that brings back some memories. As a teenager, I'd played with the various BASICs and eventually scored a copy of Borland's Turbo Pascal IDE and compiler. After the "web" came about, like everyone else at the time, I discovered HTML and started making web pages (such as this [0] amazing example of creative artistic design) but that quickly became boring. At some point, I stumbled across Matt's Script Archive (mentioned in the article), formmail.pl [1], the guestbook [2] (mine [3] is still around, apparently), and so on. These scripts were amazingly popular at the time. Anyways, I gained my first bits of Perl knowledge from reading through those scripts and modifying them. Nowadays, as a network engineer and sysadmin, Perl is still pretty much the first tool I reach for to help me do my job. Edit: Just checked and the earliest timestamp on the files in that "web site" is 1997-05-19. That web site is almost 20 years old. [0]: http://qsl.net/n9wwv/420.html http://qsl.net/n9wwv/420.html [1]: http://www.scriptarchive.com/formmail.html http://www.scriptarchive.com/formmail.html [2]: http://www.scriptarchive.com/guestbook.html http://www.scriptarchive.com/guestbook.html [3]: http://qsl.net/n9wwv/gbook/guestbook.html http://qsl.net/n9wwv/gbook/guestbook.html
rurban 10y ago
For me as old-time perl'er in Europe the birth of the web was PHP, not perl. I started using perl with perl4 to support my lisp programming. Yes, the relevant xkcd has some moments of truth. perl CGI scripts were always considered to simple and insecure, and mod_perl in Apache too hard. This totally changed with PHP. Every webhoster offered PHP support but rarely proper perl CGI support with all the needed modules. PHP had everything included, was faster and had basic web support, esp. sessions and many core modules included. Perl was a good hacking tool but not good enough for the web. I heard in the US this was different. With Plack/Catalyst/Dancer this became different, but now also PHP7 matured to a proper language, ruby and rails came up, while perl stagnates since decades. perl6 is not the solution as the change is too disruptive. With my cperl, a perl11 (5+6) with classes it might get better, but there are no classes yet. At least my perl compiler is now stable and offers memory and startup improvements, and easier deployment. Which is important on the web.

14 points by MilnerRoute 10y ago

Wow, that brings back some memories. As a teenager, I'd played with the various BASICs and eventually scored a copy of Borland's Turbo Pascal IDE and compiler. After the "web" came about, like everyone else at the time, I discovered HTML and started making web pages (such as this [0] amazing example of creative artistic design) but that quickly became boring. At some point, I stumbled across Matt's Script Archive (mentioned in the article), formmail.pl [1], the guestbook [2] (mine [3] is still around, apparently), and so on. These scripts were amazingly popular at the time. Anyways, I gained my first bits of Perl knowledge from reading through those scripts and modifying them. Nowadays, as a network engineer and sysadmin, Perl is still pretty much the first tool I reach for to help me do my job. Edit: Just checked and the earliest timestamp on the files in that "web site" is 1997-05-19. That web site is almost 20 years old. [0]: http://qsl.net/n9wwv/420.html http://qsl.net/n9wwv/420.html [1]: http://www.scriptarchive.com/formmail.html http://www.scriptarchive.com/formmail.html [2]: http://www.scriptarchive.com/guestbook.html http://www.scriptarchive.com/guestbook.html [3]: http://qsl.net/n9wwv/gbook/guestbook.html http://qsl.net/n9wwv/gbook/guestbook.html

rurban 10y ago

For me as old-time perl'er in Europe the birth of the web was PHP, not perl. I started using perl with perl4 to support my lisp programming. Yes, the relevant xkcd has some moments of truth. perl CGI scripts were always considered to simple and insecure, and mod_perl in Apache too hard. This totally changed with PHP. Every webhoster offered PHP support but rarely proper perl CGI support with all the needed modules. PHP had everything included, was faster and had basic web support, esp. sessions and many core modules included. Perl was a good hacking tool but not good enough for the web. I heard in the US this was different. With Plack/Catalyst/Dancer this became different, but now also PHP7 matured to a proper language, ruby and rails came up, while perl stagnates since decades. perl6 is not the solution as the change is too disruptive. With my cperl, a perl11 (5+6) with classes it might get better, but there are no classes yet. At least my perl compiler is now stable and offers memory and startup improvements, and easier deployment. Which is important on the web.