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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."
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 not the mothers' sob stories. It's the facts. Teenagers have an extremely high accident rate. They are inherently bad drivers, every one of them. It was foolish of the state to allow me behind the wheel of a car when I was 16. I'm much better now that I know that "yes, you can die, asshole!" Let's rephrase that for the dense teenagers (all teenagers are dense) here in slashdot: You are NOT immortal.
BTW, my daughter is now a teenager and is doing the countdown to when she can get her permit and license. I highly recommend that in 2 years you stay off the roads. It won't be safe.
-- Will program for bandwidth
I keep giving money to the Perl Foundation among various other charitable donations because a significant minority of the money I earn each year is directly related to my ability to use perl to run the projects. If I hadn't learned perl in 1994 and become better at it over the years, I'd have had to get a real job! Thanks, Larry!
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
Yeah, but geez, what's with getting so mad over some AC's stupid joke? "Hey, that anonymous person over the internet threatened to screw my daughter! I'm gonna kick his ass!" Besides, I don't think your daughter would wanna fool around with a pimply, overweight Slashdot geek anyway.
And on a side note, I feel sorry for your daughter when she actually finds somebody she would like to make love to (If she hasn't already). What are you going to do, stalk her and her boy(?)friend with a sniper rifle, waiting for the pants to drop? How about her wedding night?
I think the most productive thing you could do is to teach her about birth control, and rape and STD prevention. Oh, and don't feed the trolls.
Not trying to troll or flame here, just popping in my $0.2.
Oh, and happy birthday Perl!
vi ~/.emacs
Well I can't speak for a retirement but Perl has put food on my table and provided many enjoyable hours of application development.
Somewhere I came across a quote by Larry to the effect that greatness is measured by the degree of freedom you give to others and not by how much you coerce others into doing what you want. If that is your measure (it has become mine!) Larry you have achieved greatness.
I feels it's just as good as any other as a first language. From my perspective about all you get at first regardless of language is just a notion of variables, control structures and functions. New programmers never use the special features of whatever language they are on at the time as they don't know how to properly use them quiet yet. Once you feel you have the basics down all you need to learn going to other langues is some syntax. Good luck, have fun and don't give up. :)
-Dom
Because it's pointless?
Perl is a different tool to C and C++ not because it's interpreted, but because of its language features. It's also (IMHO) a much more expressive language than C or C++, and has quite a few features that these languages lack (for instance, to have dynamic binding for new() in C++ requires a very ugly hack - see James O. Coplien's 'advanced C++ programming idioms' book for details), where Perl does this sort of thing with ease.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Only if you write your code that way.
Yes, Perl makes it possible to write obfuscated code, but it does not enforce it. Perl makes it possible to write perfectly clear code.
But then again, even the most obfuscated code can be made clear with some well-placed comments, but comments in programs unfortunately appears to be a dying art.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
Well, C is 31 years old and C++ is 17, so don't give up on Perl yet..
i don't think this is true... besides, python is slower and requires more memory to do stuff than perl -- see http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/index2.shtml ...and any language that uses whitespace as syntax is only ever going to attract a marginal following.