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Happy Birthday Perl!
Puppet Master writes: "Just remembered that Perl was created on this day (12/18) in 1987 by Larry Wall..." Check out the Time Line and the discussion on use.perl.org and I'll take this chance as a reminder to donate to the Damian Conway/Dan Sugalski slavery fund.
Let's just call it an accidental feature. --Larry Wall
My motto in life, well, at least my programming
visit my free wallpaper collection, wp.erasei.com
I don't normally plug things but, this is free, and it seems appropriate:
Currently Barnes and Nobles and their partnership is currently offering FREE Learn Perl courses online....
They try and sucker you in to buy the book, but it is not necessary for those who don't want to, but again, it is a very good book, therefor I would recommend it.
So if you ever wanted to know what we were all talking about when we say "PERL", now's your chance...
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
what part of
2 ;$ t=255;@t=map{$_%16or$t^=$c^=(
;$t^=(72,@z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%16
- -$ h+84])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$
;$d=$d>>8^($f=$t&($d>>12^$d>> ;4^
$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$c=14
$m=(11,10,116,100,11,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])&110
-2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)[$_%8]}(16..271 );if((@a=unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h
=5;$_=unxb24,join"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[
d=unxV,xb25,$_;$e=256|(ord$b[4])<<9|ord$b[3]
$d^$d/8))<<17,$e=$e>>8^($t&($g=($q =$e>>14&7^$e)^$q*8^$q<<6))<< 9,$_=$t[$_]^
(($h>>=8)+=$f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}p rint+x"C*",@a}';s/x/pack+/g;eval
don't you understand??
Wow, Perl was created in 1 day? I think we're celebrating the fact that perl was released to the world on this day 14 years ago.
GeneralKael -- Slacker Extraordinaire
that's much easier to write in Python.
Perl is the x86 instruction set of computer languages. Python is the ARM.
Heidi Wall:
There's more than one way to do it.
Yes, Heidi, and I'd be glad to show you several of them.
Another b-day, and I wasnt invited AGAIN. Not that I remembered it or bought any presents anyway. But still..
Slashcode is written in Perl. I'm not sure if that's an advertisement for or against slash, Perl, or both.
Best Slashdot Co
Why was this story deleted and then put back on the front page?
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
Why would I celebrate Perl's birthday. All she does is send horrible movies to those nice 'bots....
Oh, wrong Perl. Nevermind..
I'll send them cheesy movies
The worst I can find <la-la-la>
They'll have to sit and watch them all
And I'll monitor their minds <la-la-la>
www.eFax.com are spammers
Don't be surprised if you begin seeing Perl tend to lean towards more pornography and opposite-sex modules. Excitement will soon begin for the car and driving modules as well!
Larry, although Perl doesn't want to talk with you as much during these rebellious years, please make sure that it takes care of itself during its bodily changes, including washing its face, as acne outbreaks are rampant during these years and can ruin its complexion forever.
Berto
You don't have to use C to confuse people.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
http://paulagordon.com/shows/wall/
Also, this would be a good time to remember the principles of good programming:
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
PERL's a Saggitarius. The most philisophical of all the signs.
A week before Christmas isn't too bad.
Seriously - what else can do system admin scripting(on many different systems), database programming, web programming, network programming, and do it all on just about any platform, not to mention virtually everything C, awk, sed and shell scripting can do.
Nothing, that I know of.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
post a password if you post such links
Perl is really the reason I stay with programming. Trained in Cobol, Pascal, C, and C++, I thought that coding was an adventure like delving into the depths of Mayan pyramids - difficult and yet rewarding. There's only so much grinding one can take, though, and I was at the point of giving it all up to focus all my time on engineering new toys for all the boys and girls.
Then I found Perl. Built-in data structures, a text-parsing mechanism that's second to none, and a community that's more interesting than a barrel of camels. Programming in Perl is like painting, it's fun, engaging, and every bit of creativity that rolls from the tips of your fingers is reflected in the code.
Besides, I've had the opportunity to have lunch with Randal, and he was much more interesting than Bjarne (who couldn't be bothered, but I'm sure is a nice guy).
No coal for you this year, Larry.
Dancin Santa
Because it has all the great functional features that can make Lisp programmers happy.
Because it has a wonderful OO model which can make all OO programmers happy.
Because it has super fast compilers that can make C and C++ programmers happy.
Because it is great for imperative programming and for functional programming.
Because it is great for procedural programming and for OO programming.
Because it is as multiplatform and portable as Java.
Because it is designed to please everyone without compromising on anything, and, put more simply, because it can reconciliate the C, Java, Lisp and C++ community.
Because it can even be used indifferently as a scripting or a system language.
Because it is great for teaching AND for the real world.
Because its compilers are libre software and its design and developement are made in a very open fashion.
--
"buckle your seatbelt, dorothy - kansas is going bye-bye."
$6.21 is the number of the beast before sales tax. Meh.
...but my favorite language is, has and always will be: Brainfuck.
Heidi Wall
Break out the PERL camels and dolphins!
Come on guys ... lets check these facts before posting them!!
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
Personally I like Perl because I can shoot myself in the foot faster and with less effort with it.
:-)
"Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation." - Carl Sagan
Brad turns 38 today.
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Pitt,+Brad
Look, a lot of you people come from what I call the Computer Science Student mentality. This unfortunately something I've noticed as a side effect of the way computer science is taught in most schools. It's quite unfortunate, because that clearly isn't the aim of the Professor's when they are teaching classes this way.
I'll use my school as an example. When I started at the University of Dayton, about 7 years ago, every class was taught in ADA. It was a horrible horrible expierence. The ADA compilers were horribly lacking at the time, and anybody who has done any work in ADA will know that it is an extremely strict and picky language. That has it's good and bad sides when it comes to teaching programming, but I'll save that for a different discussion. I had no problems, since, well, I had a good solid 4 years for Pascal and C/C++ programming experience before I even started college, but this seriously affected the other students in my class.
The problem was, about two years into the program, my school decided (thank god) to switch the department over to C++. This was a great move, because now the students were being taught a language that they could actually apply in the real world (beyond the confines of the Wright Patterson Air Force base anyway). It worked out quite well for the newer students, but my classmates were blindsided. Most of them suffered through half a semester of C (the other half of the semester was 360 assembler) and never even touched upon C++. They should have just been able to pick up a C++ book, apply the concepts they learned from their ADA classes and the syntax from the C++ book and their C course and move on, but most of them had a hard time doing it.
Why was that? They all knew the concepts. They all knew how to write their algorithms, and their trees, and their stacks and queues. Yeah, they weren't taught how to write real software, but they clearly knew the basics. I spent more time helping others learn these concepts than I did doing my own homework the first two years, so I know what they were capable of from first hand experience.
The problem was entirely in their minds. C++ is a huge ugly beast, and it is a bit imposing when you first start. But if you've got two solid years of programming behind you, it should be a relatively smooth and easy transition. Most of them didn't realize this though. They were scared of C++, they were scared of new languages, and they suffered as a result.
The simple fact of the matter is, if you know one language, you know them all. It's not the syntax that makes the difference, it's the concepts that you express within the framework of the language's syntax that are the real guts of programming. My classmates took awhile to realize this (and I'm sure many of them still don't). That's the same thing with Ruby, or Python, or Perl, or just about any language. Unless you are making the jump from procedural to OOP, or OOP to Functional for the first time, you *CAN* pick up a book and learn a new language in a days time. The only thing stopping you is yourself.
Now, the other part of this is, why would you do that? I love learning new languages, and I love learning new languages for a few reasons. These reasons apply to every programmer, and I honestly don't understand why some people are so opposed to learning something new. I guess that's what seperates a good programmer from a bad programmer. So if you want to know why you should learn Perl, or LISP, or Haskell, or even Visual Basic, I'll tell you why.
1. It helps keep your skills in tip top shape. Perusing a computer manual may remind you of algorithms or techniques you haven't used in a long time and forgotten.
2. You always seem to learn something new. Not some new technical trick that only works in one lanuage (although that definitely happens), but just a different way of approaching problems that sometimes can transcend language boundaries.
3. You may find a new language that allows you to get the job done faster!
4. You're enhanced knowlege of languages looks great on your resume no matter what you use as your primary language.
5. You learn the way other people think. And I don't want to gloss over this one. As a programmer, you frequently have to work with other programmers. Learning new languages is a *GREAT* way to see how other people do things. To learn the way other people think, so to speak. By learning Perl and Smalltalk, you start to learn why people in those communities are so die hard about OOP programming styles. By learning LISP or Haskell you start to learn why Functional styles even exist! And it all comes back full circle. Techniques I learned from Haskell I now use when writing C++ programs and vice versa. It only made my C++ code better.
Knowlege is power, and learning new languages is one (of many) ways of increasing your knowlege. Go ahead and try it, even if you think you won't use the language, and even if you're just starting out and don't think the transition from your learning language to a new one will be easy. You just might be surprised by how much you already know, and how much you have yet to learn. That's the real benefit of it.
It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
$6.21 is the number of the beast before sales tax. Meh.
Saggitarius: All your friends are laughing behind your back - kill them. Take down all the naked pictures of Earnest Borgnine you've got hanging in your den. - Weird Al Yankovic, "Running with Scissors"
I, too am a perl fan. It does almost any sort of programming I need it to. I can do it quickly. And, I can port the script near-seamlessly accross almost every platform I deal with--except my Palm.
In fact, I have convinced my teammates to take it up as our de facto standard scripting language.
Now, if I could just port it to all platforms I deal with (hint for perl for palm)
I don't know abouy you guys, but Perl has become a huge part of my livelyhood. Let's try to all donate at least $5, we've got enough slashdotters that we could really make a huge difference.
I may be a poor college student, but without Perl, I wouldn't be able to be here at all!
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
As aliens with no legal rights (but advanced technology we can't communicate with) learn sex tips from ESR, DALNet, Perl and Python have announced that AOL has inserted GPL'd code into Windows, causing many to ask "What isn't in the Internet when Slashdot is at war?". Meanwhile, in another part of the galaxy, Star Bridge is using lzip compression to manufacture boots that will let you jump 6 feet in the air, enough to see the movie screen from behind Jon Katz's head.
That sound about right?
1. for saving us from unix shell
2. hacking together many of the greate unix
command line utilities into a language
3. string processing
4. laying the groundwork for python
According to this list my florist gave me, you shouldn't celebrate with Pearl until your 30th year of marriage...
"Isn't that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life."
Perl is the x86 instruction set of computer languages. Python is the ARM.
That makes Visual Basic the Z80 of computer languages then I guess?
mogorific carpentry experiments
Ah, yes. Intentional obfuscation. Cool for if you want to say "Look! Decode a DVD in 7 lines!" Bad as a real example.
And Bill Hicks would have been 40 last Sunday if he was still alive.
The meept would be sure that he would say the same thing as meept about all the executives visiting this webiste , who ironically, are now looking to sell it!
the meept has been scared away, like all the open source nerds back to usenet, as the signal to noise ratio there is much lower.
Although the meept is sure that Bill would have used the word "fuck".
MEEPT!!
Because it has a wonderful OO model which can make all OO programmers happy.
Because it is great for procedural programming and for OO programming.
You must be kidding. I love Perl, but its idea of OO is afterthought and a complete joke.
hmmm. Care to share said proof?
I'll agree she looks like a skank, but appearances can be deceiving.
print "Happy Birthday, Perl!\n" while ! $end_of_times;
It's times like these when I wish I were a moderator.
I had exactly the same sort of experience, when I was in school, with teaching my classmates to transcend "language" to get at the roots of programming/computing. I still face this problem every single day in my workplace. Language/platform zealots are everywhere.
My colleagues find it amusing that in my spare time at work I try to learn a new language/platform. When they don't have anything to do, I tell them that they should learn a new language and give the same reasons that you do. It is sad that they never take my advice.
Oh well...
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
I just wrote a perl script, first in quite some time. And now I find out it is its birthday.
Interesting...
"O, Perl is a language,
As muddy as muddy can be.
First it gave me headaches,
and now it's killing me!"
In all reality though, I like Perl. It's dirty, it's cheap, it works, it makes my web pages a bit easier to work with.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Okay, I give up, what does the "black perl" script listed on that timeline page (or also findable by searching google for "black perl") actually do?
:)
I'd run it and find out, but I notice scary commands like "unlink" and "kill" in there and I have a feeling that I wouldn't like the results if I tried it
Stuart.
Love it for its ability to get stuff done with no messing, hate it for the way it can really bite you in the ass, Perl is hard to ignore.
Happy Birthday, ya adorable scuzball camel-type language.
"Well, put a stake in my heart and drag me into sunlight."
"Just remembered that Perl was created on this day (12/18) in 1987 by Larry Wall..."
He did the whole thing in a day? Damn!
This tagline is umop apisdn.
Larry Wall stating where to get perl and when it was put there
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
I know I'm a bit of a slow learner and I don't think any easy change of attitude will remedy that. But I have, over my career, developed a truly powerful command of some languages. Really, when I know perl as well as i once knew 370 assembler I am going to be one 1337 dude! But I don't think there are too many people who can acquire that level of skill in a single day.
I also have a problem with trying to gain even a basic working familiarity with the nuts and bolts of too many languages, especially if they are highly similar. The different constructs tend to get mixed up in my head. I have to think about syntax, not the problem I'm trying to solve. I keep having to look things up. That was why I gave up on Visual Basic. Of course it isn't suitable for many kinds of program, but beyond that, I didn't want to deal with all the quirky (and probably pointless) little differences between VB, VB for applications, Access VB, VB for Nose Picking, hell, I don't even remember all the weird variations MS came out with back when I cared.
What I really like to do is get to a point where I can type in a modest GLP of a hundred lines or so very quickly, without needing to look anything up, and then have it run correctly the first time I try it. Again, most people cannot get to that point in a single day. And to the two or three /. posters
who can: I don't know who you are... but I don't like you! ;)
----------
Manifesto for the Peoples of the Third Millennium
On the 18th day, he created Perl, and it was good.
On the 19th day, he rested.
Magius_AR
(1) I've read this comment before. VERBATIM, by another poster at least 2 months ago in a thread about Ruby.
more important:
(2) The article has NOTHING to do with Perl, or Perl's birthday. Re-read it and tell me how many times he mentions Perl..
Please, when meta-moding, *check the context* - this is a great article but it has nothing to do with Perl's Birthday! It's offtopic!
from fortune on this page:
:-) -- Larry Wall in
The prayer of serenity applies here. To both of us.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
If you read the history section closely, the date is when Perl 1 was released. I don't think that was the day Larry completed it (he was over in R&D by that time), but it certainly isn't the original birthday of Perl. I should know. I was there.
:-)
To tell the story yet again. Larry and I were sharing an office at SDC. Larry needed a program to support a configuration management system he was developing for the BLACKER program. Awk wouldn't do the job of marching through the news directories. And so he developed perl (version 0). I know; for I was the first user, using a combination of perl and other programs to support a data dictionary for the ACC portion of BLACKER, where we would maintain the data dictionary in nroff, and the pascal source would be automatically derived.
So, celebrate if you will, but remember exactly what you are celebrating. And drink and drive responsibly
Daniel
Perl's Maternal Godparent.
Are we all invited to the Bar Mitzvah?
(I know Larry is a Christian, but his brainchild is experimenting with Judaism).
Perl adapts to your coding style, Python forces you to indent its way.
Perl is the standard scripting language for UNIX sysadmins.. what is Python the standard for?
Perl is a great "glue" language, and was here first.. what does Python have that will migrate the huge mass of Perl programmers away?
Personally I don't know anyone that uses Python, and anyone who writes scripts knows Perl.
Cut and paste straight from here (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20215&cid=215 3745), a comment by Dalroth about Ruby. In the "Programming in the Ruby language" story. All he did was replace Ruby with Python. And why was this modded up, anyway? Does "offtopic" mean nothing to you people? I don't care if he wrote "War and Peace", if I'm reading an article about Perl's birthday then I want to read related posts - things about Perl's history, or Perl's current situation- not some essay trying to convince me to use Rub^H^H^HPerl.
the occasion was the birth Larry's third child, in May of 1987.
On that reckoning, Perl will be fifteen years old this coming February.
there is a post about the birth of Geneva Marie (Wall?) on may 12 1987, listing previous "off the wall software products", among them perl with the age given as "3mo".
however, as perl was publically announced on dec 18, and we don't have any other specific date, we should stick to it.
now, if we would know the date when the first print(hello world!\n); was sent through the perl interpreter, that would be a good date.
--
making up good sigs is a hard thing to do.
What an odd coincidence! No wonder I like Perl so much... it's almost like Larry Wall gave me a gift on my 12th birthday. Well... maybe not.. but funny anyway! :-)
This makes Java the Alpha of programming languages...
Shouldn't it say, "released on this day", or, "completed on this day"? It's just a bit misleading :)
today is spelling optional day.
Perl is emphatically not an object-oriented language. Perl's OO features were crudely hacked in after-the-fact. This unfortunate compromise is the equivalent of trying to bolt an internal-combustion engine onto a stagecoach instead of designing an automobile from the ground up.
Too many simple tasks are pointlessly complicated. Take the simple example of creating an array whose elements are arrays. Not only does the developer need to use additional inner brackets for each element, but they must also remember to use the unique @{$a[1]} syntax when referencing. Why all the extra steps? Who knows.
Perl is notoriously impossible read and maintain. Walk into any bar frequented after-hours by veteran developers and you'll hear story after story being swapped about having to decipher brain-crushing lines of text like :" (my @parsed =$URL =~ m@(\w+)://([^/:]+)(:\d*)?([^#]*)@) || return undef;". This unreadability is in part the result of the fact that:
Perl attempts to be all things to all people and ends up being second-rate at everything. Perl is widely known as the "duct tape of the internet", and it performs superbly in this role. However, just as you cannot build a house out of duct tape alone, so attempting to turn a language that was originally developed for scripting brief, handy utilities into a do-all, be-all programming language will only result in the buggy, bloated, "write-only" mess that Perl has become. It has been said that you only need to know 10% of Perl to do 90% of your job. It should be added that anyone trying you utilize 90% of Perl would have time enough to do 10% of their job.
Subroutine signatures, orthogonals, method access, data inheritance: this list could go on and on. But there is no real need. Its is now clear that Perl is doomed. At this very moment, Perl 6.0 is being cobbled together, with bulletins about the myriad upcoming features of the new version being issued with titles referring to the Biblical Book of the Apocalypse, the favorite text of messianic streetcorner lunatics. There is no better indicator of the deranged states of mind of the developers behind Perl than this unfortunate choice of imagery. Software developers with any interest in future employment/relevance should seize this opportunity to attain fluency in Ruby or Python and donate their Perl books to the History Department of their local University.
ADA: Americans with Disabilities Act
Ada: programming language named after Ada (not "ADA") Lovelace.
*grrrrrr*
Who cares. It's a good comment, deserves to be repeated.