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."

Comments

Re:16 year olds can get a learner's permit...

[rossz]

Or I could just kick your ass and give you a shotgun enema. How does that sound?

US Driver's License

[ari_j]

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.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

[Michael.Forman]

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.

Re:Why not interpreted C++, instead?

[ianezz]

C++ didn't even exist when Perl was first invented.

According to wikipedia, C++ dates back to 1979, with the first commercial compiler in 1985.

C++ is a terrible language for interpretation

Right. At least someone tried

Better to have a language which is designed for interpretation from the start.

Completely agree.

Re:1987 was 16 years ago??

[Spruce Moose]

Not wanted to troll, but you should check out Python.

Re:16 years, wow!

[smittyoneeach]

Let's not underestimate Larry Wall.
Given the time, care, and Deep Thinking going into Perl6, the possibility exists that P6 will leapfrog other scripting languages in terms of speed and power.
Its TMTOWTDIness and DWIMiness may put it in the C++ neighborhood when it comes to learning curve, but when you read what he's got in mind for regular expressions and operators, and the hints about objects, P6 should be worth the w(ai|eigh)t.
As if this were insufficiently cool, Parrot (who said bad jokes never come true?) offers some incredible potential for language interoperability, and is rockin' good in its own right.