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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."

7 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. 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.
  3. 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. :-)

  4. 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.

  5. 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?

  6. 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.