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Perl is Sweet Sixteen
surflorida writes "Perl turned sweet 16 yesterday. 'Larry Wall released Perl 1 on this day in 1987, so today Perl is 16 years old. Happy birthday Perl! You can read more about the timeline of Perl releases in perlhist.pod and at history.perl.org.' Happy birthday Perl! You are now old enough to get a US drivers license."
Well, Perl can't buy for us yet, so what's the point?
For once the "you belong in a zoo" version of Happy Birthday is applicable.
But too old for Michael Jackson. Go ahead, mod me down! Muahahaha! ;)
Better lock up the car keys...
because what hunting rifle has a bayonet lug
I remember 87 like yesterday. I remember writing 87 for the date instead of 88 on my homework. Actually come to think of it, I was in 4th grade and now am in my mid 20's. Hmmmm
Maybe it was that long ago and time is just going by too fast.
I wrote my first hello world program usinb IBM BasicA then.
http://saveie6.com/
At long last. PERL is legal!
http://siokaos.org/
Only 2 more years until shes legal, boys ;)
I've left to find myself. If you happen to see me, please, keep me there until I return.
it's no longer considered statutory...
My other sig is an import.
Thanks to crying mothers telling sob stories of teenagers getting into crashes, in most US states, 16 now gets you a learner's permit, but you need to be 17 to drive without your parent sitting next to you.
Furthermore, restrictive licenses given to young drivers in most states make carpooling with fellow high school students illegal... at my high school, 50 more cars showed up the day that law went into effect in 1998 and every day thereafter...
I could just imagine the kind of drivers license issued to Perl. First off, it would have a magnetic stripe, barcode, brail, and RFID encoded driver's license number on the back. The photo would be in the visual, infra-red, and ultraviolet spectrums. The license itself would be an actual 4d hypercube turning into your social security card, credit cards, gas cards, library cards, and translations of all the above into every language depending on the licenses orientation in space-time. In the event of emergency, the license would also be a flotation device and in the rare case of ending up on a desert island can be turned into a Swiss army knife and satellite GSM phone with GPS capabilities. Biometric identification built into the license allows it to change into the proper license for whoever is holding it. The license would be powered by a kinetic energy system similar to no-wind watches. It would also have a backup fusion generator, solar cells, hydrogen fuel cells, lithium ion battery banks, and be expandable for anti-mater generators once they become available.
Then you would lose it and it would be eaten by a snake.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
Yes. but it's only allowed to execute code until 11pm...and its parents damn well better not find out that it forks around, because it needs parental permission to kill a child process(should it fail to handle variables safely.)
Oh, and the kernel keeps a shotgun by the front door just in case any Java applets come around asking if Perl can go to the movies...
Please help metamoderate.
Happy birthday Perl! You are now old enough to get a US drivers license
hmm... i didn't know you needed a license to ride a camel
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
Keep It Simple Stupid.
I guess we really can say Perl is sweet 16, never been KISS'd.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
This does nothing about the idiot drivers who aren't teenagers
Now Perl is one language that just can not get old and die quickly enough. I mean, if I wanted to take all the features of Java, then combine them with a syntax that combines the worst features of C and BASIC, then special case everything so that it was even more confusing, well, I guess I'd have something a lot like Perl.
It's just you.
I can get to it just fine. It also shows up on root servers.
We built a world-class business on the back of Perl. Nothing else would have done the trick.
THANKS LARRY.
way to go, /.
miss perl's birthday.. but for some reason i am not surprised
Take them fast, Java's parent is on its deathbed.
Flamebait?!? What, are the Michael Jackson fans going to come out of the woodwork and hijack the thread?
:)
You know you laughed!
the icon of perl ..i.e. the camel along side the article. I agree it is not funny, but the above mentioned is the basis of the joke.
"Perl looks like an explosion at an ASCII factory" - I forget who said that.
:help the damned.
Here's a fun one. (Forgive me, I've had one too many Jack and Cokes). In VIM, enter
It'll come back with "There is no help for the damned"
Har har har. THat kills me. Time for another drink.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Only on slashdot, geeks make jokes about having sex with a programming language...
What fucking US centric asshole did mod the parent as offtopic???
Haha!
Maybe it can finally learn to speak english then ;^)
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Perl turned 16 2 days ago, on Dec. 18th.
Happy belated birthday, anyway.
My IT career started out with Perl on Linux. Thank you.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
I thought this was going to be about Woz's Sweet-16 interpreter for the Apple II (see bottom of that page), but no luck. I guess it's about 28 years old now....
darn, I dated myself.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
http://saveie6.com/
This means that Pearl is also legal to have sex with in most states. So, if you want to give Pearl a "pearl necklace," go right ahead. Just make sure there is no drinking involved as that might jam you up with the law
Welcome to the land of the free...pay toll ahead...no photography...please open your bag...
Suppose Larry had used his considerable brainpower to make an interpreted version of C or C++, instead of making a completely new language?
i remember, oh, about 5 years ago, when i first met perl. it was the first language that i could actually do something in. even though i was using only a subset, mostly cgi stuff, and yet, i had POWER. i had several web sites up and running, data driven, mostly flat file stuff, but especially my school site, with 100 teachers, they could post homework, news, etc., we had a whole content driven site. all from perl with no database. i use java and python, as well as obj-c and cocoa, but damn, for me, there is still nothing like my first real love. perl.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Yeah, but she's been fucked every which way long before today...
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
I couldn't afford a car for you to drive, but I have this really nice camel, chicks dig a camel.
Learn something new.
About the same amount of time it will take them to finish Perl 6!
until perl turns 21.. i have never seen what a camel looks like drunken!
It's an important milestone...0x10 years old! Whoo-hoo!
In US you're allowed to drive a car at that age? Bah. In other countries (such as Finland) it's the age when anyone can have sex with you legally. Oh, and we can't drive car until 18. Much better IMHO.
(the bold was added by me)
here
You forget - we're the United States of America, that's states plural. The state I grew up in (and no, not that long ago) issued me a driver's license when I was not quite 14 years old. And some states require you to be 18 or something like that. It really seems incongruent, until you look at the reasoning. In extremely rural states, it's hard to operate the family farm if the kids can't drive.
$message = $age ge 16 ? "Legal" : "Illegal"; echo $message;
Oh great, now I have to remember my 16th (Being born 12/17/87) birthday as:
:-P
The day 2.6.0 came out.
The day ROTK came out.
The 100th anniversery of the first flight.
Five days before my brother's birthday.
Three days before my grandfather's birthday.
Two days before Perl's birthday.
And six days before Christ's birthday.
Goddamnit.
That's one fat teenage chick, man.
"and remember, as an added bonus, there is more then one way to do it.... ;-)"
And remember to "use protection;", you insensitive clod.
I'd hit it /bugger this isn't FARK :(
Just this week I purchased Learning Perl 3rd edition. This is my first attempt at programming. As a systems admin I think perl will really help me out day to day. I have heard pros and cons to Perl as a first programming language but would love to hear the /. perspective.
So, if they're not German, they must be from the US?
Tard.
"And remember to "use protection;", you insensitive clod."
We are talking about perl right?
http://saveie6.com/
Maybe by the time Perl is 30, it (he? she?) will have mellowed out and won't be quite as unruly as it is now...
In 1987 I was just finishing off running a three year software development effort that had a peak staff of around 30 people and a little over $2M budget. The overall project (my part was about 40% of the the software) was a radar system for the Navy (ROTH-R) and was written in FORTRAN and ran on VAXes. Everyone was wondering who would replace Ronald Reagan in 1988 and the biggest thing going on in software was everyone was learning Ada.
There now. Hopefully, you don't feel so old anymore and you didn't even have to respond to some spam that promised to make you feel young again. BTW, I started using perl in 1992 (perl 2.0) after I bailed out of management.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
So by sweet sixteen you are implying that a language that many geeks use is female? this makes sense now.
touch perl
finger perl
mount perl
Life is like pants... fit in or you don't fit in.
Slashdot's comments are next to worthless. It's mostly a bunch of cows following the ass in front of them
A keeper!
If you are a normal person, then you cannot read a thing if it's written on Perl. Unless your brains are already too damaged.
Less is more !
No.
Even if I say something insightfull or inteligent, it doens't matter cause I'm an ass.
Some things don't get better with age.
...and you smell like one too!
Ha ha ha ha.
But seriously, I respect Perl, it's just that I can't get the damn syntax down.
In Soviet New Jersey, Perl has illegal sex with you!
Chris
I've been programming perl for almost a decade, after learning it for a system administration job at UnixOps at the University of Colorado.
For those who work in Linux, Unix, or MacOS, I have a useful collection of well documented perl scripts for manipulating data and metadata from the command line.
Most useful are newpl, which creates a full-featured template as a starting point for new perl scripts, and ren-regexp which can manipulate filenames on the command line using a chain of regular expressions. Happy birthday perl!
Michael.
Linux : Mac
I like perl, use it every day, but any language that allows source code like this should be, like, banned by the government or something, shouldn't it??
Sweet Sixteen is an older computer language designed by Steve Wozniak (see http://oldcomputers.net/byteappleII.html and http://www.fadden.com/dl-apple2/sweet16.txt) for the apple ][ and is a little less bloated than Perl.
...how a primary Open Source project like Perl turns out to have been there long before this whole Linux thing?
:-); I just didn't realize this was true.
I mean "what's the story behind this", not "why could this happen". I don't have a problem with this (not at all
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Gives a whole new meaning to "There's More Than One Way To Do It".
-- Repeat with me: "There is no right to profits".
...I can't understand a thing that it is saying!
Not trolling! I love Perl dearly 8^)
"Send an Instant Karma to me" - Yes
I knew Perl programmers loved their language. But after so many mentions of the possibility of having sex with it, I'm definetely scared.
Hell, in Hawaii, Perl would be old enough to have gotten married and have a kid with another one on the way.
God Bless America, eh?
Well, in my opinion you are a child molestor too! Die, witch!
Now there are 3 that can legally never have sex with me.
People have often told me that French is, in some ways, more expressive than English. But, I think there is nothing about English that cannot be fixed.
Similarly, why didn't Larry put his energetic and brilliant expressiveness into C? C (and later C++) needs that expressiveness.
C and C++ Interpreters exist. For example, CINT C/C++ Interpreter.
I think it would be great if GCC had a switch or an add-on that could turn it into an interpreter. GCC already as most of the rest of the kitchen sink: "GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection, which currently contains front ends for C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada, as well as libraries for these languages (libstdc++, libgcj,...). Further frontends are available."
An "ugly hack", as you say, it just a challenge waiting for a brilliant programmer like Larry to make it beautiful.
I think I have part of the answer to my question. I think Larry could not see into the future. I'm guessing he didn't realize that all languages either die or become complete. I'm guessing he might not have made Perl if he had realized that he would commit 16 years of his life to make a language that would lose its quick-and-easy aspect and become as complicated as any other.
roses are red, and ready for plucking,
you're sixteen, and ready for high school.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Happy birthday Perl! You are now old enough to get a US drivers license."
So the Camel can drive now, cool. But, I'm sorry, he can't vote, drink, or smoke, and if we see him SELLING CIGARETTES(!) we'll hunt him down and try our hand at Chinese Camel's Hump Soup!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
Of the languages I've learned, quite a few have been from academic sources:
But I'd have to say that the class that helped me so much wasn't relevant to the language itself -- it was how you thought about the programming.
These days, resources are so cheap, that it's no big deal if it takes too long to run, runs out of memory, or is 25M of source on disk -- you just upgrade the computer. But in taking assembly, you had to learn the tradeoffs between code size, memory usage, and speed. That's helped me more than anything else, in my opinion, as it's helped me look at my work in a different light. If you understand how the computer's handling your code, you can optimize it. eg:
is slower than
You just have to think of your arrays in backwards order, or make sure they're not order dependent.
Reasons for the speed increase:
If you do it as
Doesn't solve the second issue, and it requires more memory.
The intro to Fortran class I took also stressed language independant concepts -- pseudocode -- breaking everything down into its component parts before you write it. I was never a fan of flowcharts, but I often have blocks of pseudocode in the comments of a perl or PHP script, so I can go back years later, and remember what I was trying to do.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Vastly inferior to the Yoda Doll suppository.
-1, Offtopic
Thanks Mr. Wall for allowing me to spend three lovely months in Helsinki, Finland. And thanks Finland, you are unbelievably beautiful.
.Sig Generator because sentiment should not be auto-generated :-)
If anyone ever gets the chance to work for/with Nokia, do it, it is a nice corporate culture and if you get to go to Finland, you will not regret it.
For you language purists, if you use a small subset of perl, you can generate very clean and even simple code. It all depends on what syntax/features you choose. And, remember, how you organize your code determines how clean the program is anyhow; the language is just the vehicle for expressing logic, the program is the destination and *how* you get there.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
For true peace & happiness: www.mihr.com
Manual
Opinions?
There are a lot of reasons to love Perl, but the biggest for me has always been that in a language where the tight binding of many languages' features was commonplace, usability had to be built on the back of convention. This has lead to GOOD Perl code being far more usable, maintainable and, yes, beautiful than the good code I see in all but C (not C++).
Every other language I've seen has a far worse ratio of features to elegance. Even python, which is close in terms of both lacks that essential last mile of usability because ultimately it's a language that imposed a style and a set of conventional constraints early on (design) and never allowed the community to discover its best practices. Perl will continue to improve, but for the first time in language design, that improvement is truly a community effort, with nearly every change made for perl 6 having come from the community as RFCs, and only the bent through the crooked lens of Larry's vision for Perl.
In other news, Perl was recently added to the OED... somehow that really made me feel good. I dunno why
Mental illness alert! Anger problem.
it's still not legal to fuck with perl in most states.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
It is far easier to develop with an Interpreter/Compiler combination, when they both have the same output binary. It saves a huge amount of time. Some interpreters are really incremental compilers. They compile on demand when they see the source code is newer than the compiled binary. Microsoft's FoxPro is an example of this.
However, the main point is: Why not put all the good stuff into one language?
I find it laborious and tiring remembering the syntax and quirks and compiler bugs of several different languages.
*ahem* I take offence to that, mkkk?
Perl would now be allowed to work until midnight on school nights, and 1AM on Fridays and Saturdays. Perl could also work up to 44 hours a week, and his employers would probably take full advantage of this.
However, even though Perl can work until midnight or 1AM, he can't drive for another six months.
He's now completely legal in PA. If he ever decides to hookup with C, it's all OK.
Still no booze, smokes, or voting. Gotta wait for that.
That's exactly what Larry's doing. Of course, his definition of "good stuff" is probably different from yours as is his choice of "one language".
how to invest, a novice's guide
Someone espically fond of Perl. A little Ode to Larry Wall and Perl.
It's such a shame that Java encourages you to comment your code. How the hell are you supposed to remain the only person who can understand your code, if you keep leaving instructions for other people?!
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
for($i=0;$i<4;$i++){print"hooray!\n"}
In my opinion, C++ needs all of Perl's pattern matching and text manipulation facilities. They should be part of the language. The String class is not enough.
I'm happy that someone else decides which language will be the standard, and will have all the capabilities brought into it. It's just that I don't like trying to stay current with multiple languages.
If you look at the structure of French, it is a mess. For example, verbs are irregular. There's no reason for it; it just grew that way. If you look at the structure of English, it is a mess. Many, many words are pronounced differently than they are spelled. Human languages weren't designed, they were just thrown together.
We don't need to accept haphazard design in programming languages. We can do better for ourselves.
My 0.02:
Perl is best suited for text-munging (e.g. logging, parsing), web stuff, and as glue code to make other things interoperate. It's got some lovely stuff like foreach and proper regexps that is missing from other languages. Perl also offers you a lot of flexibility in how you approach different tasks.
The downsides of Perl are a tacked on object model, and perhaps so much flexibility that reading other people's code can be difficult at times.
Some advice:
use strict;
if you're used to strong typing, and use -w on your shebang line to get verbose error messages (i.e. start your scripts with #!usr/bin/perl -w)
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
Talking about moderation is always offtopic. As is this post.