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Happy birthday, Perl. Paradoxically, Perl 6/Raku's extremely long development cycle has led to Perl 5 "stagnation", in other words stability, which is a good t
by tannhaeuser 5y ago
Happy birthday, Perl.
Paradoxically, Perl 6/Raku's extremely long development cycle has led to Perl 5 "stagnation", in other words stability, which is a good thing.
Personally, I didn't like that Perl has spoiled the concept of regexps with (Turing-complete?) constructs when it originally was beautifully aligned with the regular/context-free-and-above language dichotomy.
And that Perl came to replace my beloved, and portable, awk/shell scripts.
Aaand that Perl, for a while, usurped the ".pl" file suffix, when everybody knows it belongs to Prolog programs.
- pkrumins 5y agoHappy birthday from me as well! Perl 6 was a huge mistake. Catastrophically bigger than Python's version 3. Somehow developers put up with upgrading to Python 3, but ain't nobody upgrading to Perl 6.
- bonniejawker 5y agoI often thought about this. How come perl didn't choose .prl instead?
- pkrumins 5y agoBecause no one gives a crap about Prolog. PL is Perl (is life).
- cesarb 5y agoAFAIK, the Unix filesystems of that era had a limit of only 14 bytes for the filename. With a limit that short, every character counts. (Nowadays, the most common filename size limit seems to be either 255 bytes or 255 characters, depending on the filesystem.)
- orev 5y agoOn Unix systems people rarely used file extensions like this. Any program that you would run simply had no extension. It’s the shebang line that would launch the correct interpreter. Extensions denoting the file type was more of a Windows thing so it knew what app to use to open the program.