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Perl is Sweet Sixteen

Posted by michael on from the jailbait dept.

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."

14 of 352 comments (clear)

  1. Thank you Larry!! by Ars-Fartsica · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Perl programming bought my house, cars, retirement. We gave you some stock Larry but not enough. If you are reading this you know what company I am talking about.

    We built a world-class business on the back of Perl. Nothing else would have done the trick.

    THANKS LARRY.

    1. Re:Thank you Larry!! by GCP · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yes, thanks, Larry. I think Perl was the right tool in the right place at the right time: the duct tape of the Web gold rush.

      From what I can tell, though, it appears to have peaked and is now in relative decline. Python is gaining rapidly on Perl in the "scripting language" space. Java, and now PHP, have eroded Perl's popularity in an area it once almost monopolized: Web apps. And its drive to evolve its way from being a useful merger of sed and awk to a full-blown object-oriented programming language may be dragging too much legacy syntax to go much farther.

      I'm not trying to insult Perl. It has been enormously helpful to me for years. I'm just seeing signs that at 16, it's probably past its prime.

      --
      "Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
  2. Re:license? by budgenator · · Score: 2, Interesting

    the Perl book haa a camel on the cover,
    additioanly Larry Wall produced Perl for work at while at the NSA; a fine example of our tax dollars at work, by people at a clue-full if secretative government agency.

    --
    Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
  3. Why not interpreted C++, instead? by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 3, Interesting


    Suppose Larry had used his considerable brainpower to make an interpreted version of C or C++, instead of making a completely new language?

  4. my first real success by b17bmbr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  5. Larry Wall's first mention of Perl on Usenet by Kickstart70 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    ...that I could find on Google...

    (the bold was added by me)

    here

    I suppose I can use myself for an example.

    All of the reasons mentioned above play a part, but I feel like they all miss the point slightly.

    At the start of any project, I'm programming primarily to please myself. (The two chief virtues in a programmer are laziness and impatience.) After a while somebody looks over my shoulder and says, "That's neat. It'd be neater if it did such-and-so." So the thing gets neater. Pretty soon (a year or two) I have an rn, a warp, a patch, or a perl. One of these years I'll have a metaconfig.

    I then say to myself, "I don't want my life's work to die when this computer is scrapped, so I should let some other people use this. If I ask my company to sell this, it'll never see the light of day, and nobody would pay much for it anyway. If I sell it myself, I'll be in trouble with my company, to whom I signed my life away when I was hired. If I give it away, I can pretend it was worthless in the first place, so my company won't care. In any event, it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission."

    So a freely distributable program is born.

    At this point I'm no longer working for a company that makes me sign my life away, but by now I'm in the habit. Besides, I still harbor the deep-down suspicion that nobody would pay money for what I write, since most of it just helps you do something better that you could already do some other way. How much money would you personally pay to upgrade from readnews to rn? How much money would you pay for the patch program? As for warp, it's a mere game. And anything you can do with perl you can eventually do with an amazing and totally unreadable conglomeration of awk, sed, sh and C.

    It's not so much that people don't value the programs after they have them--they do value them. But they're not the sort of thing that would ever catch on if they had to overcome the marketing barrier. (I don't yet know if perl will catch on at all--I'm worried enough about it that I specifically included an awk-to-perl translator just to help it catch on.) Maybe it's all just an inferiority complex. Or maybe I don't like to be mercenary.

    So I guess I'd say that the reason some software comes free is that the mechanism for selling it is missing, either from the work environment, or from the heart of the programmer.

    What programmers like me need is a benefactor, like the old composers and artists used to have. Anybody want to support me while I make beautiful things? My hope is that some billionaire who reads the net for pleasure(?) will someday say "I'd like to pay you for all the people who have used rn over the years..." and drop $1,000,000 or so on me so I could live off the interest and finish the new rn. :-)

  6. Perl is *NOT* Sweet Sixteen by fynfuqbg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:16 year olds can get a learner's permit... by JimBobJoe · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Teenagers have an extremely high accident rate.

    I believe that one of the main failures here is the conservativeness of driving schools. They believe the way to do things is to put teens behind the wheel and make em drive like grandmas, with the completely absurd expectation that they will continue driving like grandmas for the rest of their lives.

    The fact is, they don't, and neither does anyone else. All of that driver's training is worth shit because accidents don't happen when a car is being driven normally; it occurs at the very edge of the vehicle's performance. Sometimes you may be dumb and on the offense, other times you are defending yourself because of another driver's mistake, but either way, if you don't know how your car handles at the limit, you may not do the right thing.

    Saab used to give everyone who bought a new 9-3 Viggen a chance to drive it on a closed course with professional drivers (an intensive three day course as I recall.) Everyone I've heard who's been through the program said they learned more about driving there than many years of experience.

    Expensive, yes, but a $500-$2000 investment in a professional driving training on a closed course like the one mentioned above is what our new drivers really need.

    Not to mention that you get the added benefit of (potentially) getting all the high speed stupid driving out of the teen before they get on the road.

  8. Re:Perl may be old but it's new to me by morganjharvey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think it all depends on what setting the new programmer is learning.
    In an academic setting, there is a lot more room for teaching abstract concepts and giving a more thorough explanation than might be available in a self-taught environment. Also, there is a basis behind computer science that is completely language independent and requires a fundamental understanding of key concepts that might be best learned by writing 30 lines of C code for something that is implemented in perl using two lines. Things like linear linked lists and pointers come to mind.
    I learned perl outside of an academic setting and thought I had a fairly good grasp of what was going on. Some of the things that myself or coworkers (mostly the coworkers) implemented using perl blow my mind to this day. But my understanding of programming concepts was way off. Things like good algorithm design, memory management, data abstraction, etc., were all essentially foreign concepts to me.
    I've ranted long enough. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that people can learn as many languages as they want on their own, but unless they understand how and when to do things a certain way and why, their code is quite possibly no better than a "noble effort".
    I'm not trying to troll here. I've just started realising over the past couple of weeks how important formal CS training is to good programming skills. Maybe psuedo-code is the way to go?

  9. Re:Unfortunately for us sane programmers. by BoneFlower · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Actually I don't find the special cases very confusing at all. Perl has a specific paradigm... its hard to understand without working on it, but once it clicked for me, it became the easiest language I work with, beating out Visual Basic, QuickBasic, C++, COBOL... Those languages(except QuickBasic) still have their advantages, but once you learn Perl, its easy.

    Its learning curve can be steep however, but once you get there, it pays off big.

  10. Re:1987 was 16 years ago?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    No - Perl vs Java is like comparing journalistic shorthand to court proceedings. The well-written newspaper article would be something like Caml.

  11. C++ needs Larry's expressiveness. by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 2, Interesting


    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.

  12. Re:16 year olds can get a learner's permit... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I second the motion, learning the limits of the vehicle and yourself helps immensly when driving. I'm an ex-cop who thought was a pretty good driver up until I took the high-speed driving course as part of my training. We had to drive nuts in a skid pan, maneuver through a high-speed 5 mile course with lots of lane changes and hair pin turns all the while the instructor was in an identical car trying to run us off the road! When I got through that course I was amazed at what I could do with a car: I can safely take corners at 2.5 times the posted speed (but I don't, don't want to have to steam clean the car after my family poops themselves), I can threshold break while locating an escape route in a tight situation, and I can probably park my car in my garage while flying in off the street at 25 mph (but I don't want to try as it drips a bit of oil and it would be a bit slick on the front wheels). All in all, taking your vehicle out somewhere where you can really drive like an a-hole for several hours, learning the true value of being belted up nice and snug, would make many people much more proficient drivers.

  13. Re:16 huh? by weicco · · Score: 2, Interesting

    LOL :)

    Yes, there is warning sings for reindeers but in the northern part of Finland. I'm living near Helsinki, which is pretty much in south (relativily speaking) and here we only have warning sings for mooses :)

    Snow and ice is not a problem, just buy better snow-tires. Advance driver.. I have no comment on that, I don't think I'm better driver than the next guy but I know when to slow down, some don't.

    Btw. Tommi Makinen 4 - Colin McRae ? :P

    But we are really off-topic now.

    --
    You don't know what you don't know.