23 Years of Culture Hacking With Perl

Modern Perl writes "Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, reflects on Perl's history of hacking its culture, from subverting the reductionist culture of Unix to reinventing the ideas of programming language and culture in Perl 6 and the verbal aikido used to encourage honest detractors to become valuable contributors. Perl turned 23 years old last week, and Perl 6 is available."

Comments

Perl

[emijrp]

The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.

Re:Perl

[FooAtWFU]

My favorite line of Perl code ever was in a validator somewhere. It checked whether something was a valid IPv4 construct (something netmask related, I forget the specifics) by passing it to the library, and seeing whether the library threw up or not.

return !$@;#%

Yes, the last 40% was purely gratuitous.