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I remember unpacking PERL from usenet and compiling it on my Xenix box! Really back then it was amazing. At the time I was writing everything in C and having
by kator 14y ago
I remember unpacking PERL from usenet and compiling it on my Xenix box!
Really back then it was amazing. At the time I was writing everything in C and having the flexibility without the pain of C that PERL provided was such a great gift. I wrote literally 100,000's of lines of PERL (one project alone was 25k LOC) and enjoyed it all the way up until maybe 1993!
CPAN is hard to beat, having modules that work, etc. But I won't defend PERL because the reality is I almost never use it anymore. Not because there is something wrong with it, just because more often I run into problem sets that either require me to return to C (Think 45,000 QPS under 4 ms response time) and/or web stuff my dev team is more comfortable with on PhP.
PERL transformed my life and my thinking. It taught me that "Just because you CAN do something a particular way doesn't mean that you SHOULD do it that way.".. I took this much further then PERL and learned to apply it to all my projects and started writing in the "right language for the problem set". Instead of trying to fit every problem to the handful of languages I could program at that time.
Now I write in so many languages and utilize so many platforms and systems that the concept is just part of who I am when I am presented with a new problem to solve. For that I owe Larry a lifetime of beers whenever he wants one I'll be there to buy it for him! :-)
- btilly 14y agoThe language is named Perl, not PERL. See http://perldoc.perl.org/perlfaq1.html#Whats-the-difference-between-%22perl%22-and-%22Perl%22%3f http://perldoc.perl.org/perlfaq1.html#Whats-the-difference-b... for proof.
- peterwwillis 14y agoThank you. I didn't want to be the person to say it.
- astrodust 14y agoPERL and MAC (vs. Mac) are equal parts annoying, but at least PERL doesn't mean something different.
- kator 14y agoPlease don't start me on what it's named.. If I remember correctly when he posted it to usenet it was: P = Practical E = Extraction and R = Reporting L = Language Sorry if you object to the caps.. I was just being nostalgic.. From the Original comp.sources.unix SHAR file: X.TH PERL 1 LOCAL X.SH NAME Xperl - Practical Extraction and Report Language X.SH SYNOPSIS X.B perl [options] filename args https://groups.google.com/group/comp.sources.unix/tree/browse_frm/month/1988-02?_done=%2Fgroup%2Fcomp.sources.unix%2Fbrowse_frm%2Fmonth%2F1988-02%3F& https://groups.google.com/group/comp.sources.unix/tree/brows...;
- kator 14y agoAnd I remember that day because it took me a couple days to get it to compile on Xenix and my wife was pissed because all I did during the winter break was play with Perl programming. :-)
- cygx 14y ago$ perldoc perl | tail -n 14 Perl actually stands for Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister, but don't tell anyone I said that. NOTES The Perl motto is "There's more than one way to do it." Divining how many more is left as an exercise to the reader. The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why. perl v5.14.2 2012-07-12 PERL(1)
- sigzero 14y agoIt's a backronym. In the beginning it didn't stand for anything. Backronyms were tacked on later. Perl for the language and perl for the interpreter.
- btilly 14y agoNot completely true! In conversation with Larry Wall I found out that the existence of two reasonable backronyms was part of why he chose to call it Perl. Therefore the backronyms were known before the name itself was finalized.