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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."
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
That's all true, but almost anything that you can do in any of those languages you can do in Perl with 1/4 the code and in 1/8 the time.
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.
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