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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.
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?
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.
I think you're looking for the Inline module for Perl.
Dancin Santa
> Because it has all the great functional features that can make Lisp programmers happy.
:-)
:-)
Yeah. Of course it does. It support first-class functions perfectly, and of course, can handle lambda abstractions and currying without breaking a sweat. It can also do perfect continuations. It prefers recursion to looping and eschews side-effects too. Well, actually, perl 6 does do currying and first-class functions.
> Because it has a wonderful OO model which can make all OO programmers happy.
Yes, naturally. It's obvious perl was designed from the ground up to be the holy grail of OO programming. But seriously, it does have increasingly good OO support. OO in Perl 6 is nice. It's not the best OO language around, though. It's not even in the top 10. Well, maybe top 10. There aren't many OO languages that don't suck.
> Because it has super fast compilers that can make C and C++ programmers happy.
I mean, yeah, it's not slow. It doesn't have the god-awful long start-up time of Python. It's not C. It's not C++. It's not assembler. It is fast for a language of it's kind.
> Because it is great for imperative programming and for functional programming.
Imperative programming, fine. Functional programming, I think not. Not being lambda-calculus based, Perl may have a rough time with that whole mathematical provability of correctness thingy. It also doesn't do list comprehension for shit. Hell, who needs that stuff anyway.
> Because it is great for procedural programming and for OO programming.
Procedural, fine. OO, see above.
> Because it is as multiplatform and portable as Java.
Multiplatform, check. Portable as java... are we counting GUI's? If not, check.
> 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.
You CAN'T please everyone without compromising on anything. Plus, nothing will ever reconsile the Lisp community with anyone...
> Because it can even be used indifferently as a scripting or a system language.
Ok.
> Because it is great for teaching AND for the real world.
Real world... yes... for smallish programs. You don't see many enterprise-class million-line-long programs written in Perl.
Teaching... good god i hope not. If you ever get my kids started with a language as cryptic as perl with it's magic variables that it uses without asking you and it's $var syntax I'll shoot someone. You may want to check out Python though. Imagine Perl without nearly as much support or maturity, but with beautiful syntax and good OO, and it's improving real quick.
> Because its compilers are libre software and its
> design and developement are made in a very open
> fashion.
Ok.
Anyway, I like Perl. It's a wonderful language for some things. I mean, it IS the glue of the internet. But it is NOT the holy grail of programming. It does not satisfy everyone, it can not do everything. It is a good language though.
Justin Dubs
I have to disagree with you to a certain extent I have seen a fair number of people that knew C, C++. perl, python, java etc and the one thing they had in common is that they wrote C in every language.
The point is that learning the syntax of a language is very different from understanding the real powers, drawbacks etc of a language. For example in python I find multiple inheritance, introspection, object capabilities to be very useful features.
However with my experience in C++ if I had to do something in C++ I would do it it a different way this C++ has a different language philosohpy and design.
Overall knowing the syntax of many languages is okay but I think for real understanding you should master 1 or a few languages. From personal experience I have noticed that a master at a language can run circles around those that learned it in a few days and also build very elegant solutions someone with less experience could not easily do. Many times the differences in productivity are drastic. Not 10% to 20% but more like an order ot two of magnitude difference.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
This is nothing compared to what's being proposed for Perl 6. Python has been changing very incrementally (and we still have more than enough punctuation left... though I don't think anyone has proposed using any of it). In many ways it seems like it's moving to where Ruby is, but in a very different way -- Python has been practical for a long time, and is getting more and more pure as time goes on. Ruby started very pure, and is now getting to be more practical. I don't think pure and practical are in conflict, but you can only work on so much at a time, and the two languages have paced themselves differently.
As far as support, yes, the Python community is smaller. On the internet I don't think this makes a difference -- both communities are large enough that you can't be a part of them in their entirety. There are more Perl modules than Python, but for the most part there's a sufficient number of Python modules. Though in the real world -- where geography matters -- Perl is significantly better supported. You can find a Perl hacker and hire him or her fairly easily in comparison to a Python hacker.
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.
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.