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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.
> 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
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.