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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."

3 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.

  2. 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. :-)

  3. 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.