Perl at 34

Perl is a language that today is all-too-often overlooked. Its creator Larry Wall was making open source software long before the phrase had entered the common parlance. He wrote the popular rn newsgroup reader for Unix terminals, and then to update it, wrote a helper program called patch. That tool (which uses a list of differences between two files to transform one into the other) became fundamental to software development on Linux.

In Perl, the first postmodern computer language (see www.wall.org/~larry/pm. html) Larry described how both Perl and Linux were deserving of the PoMo monicker. Both were open source, borrowed heavily from Unix and required “a lot of people who think programming is serious fun”.

So we figured Perl, its history, its developers and its community were long overdue some time and space. Before there were dev-ops and The Cloud, system administrators were crafting Perl scripts to do things too complicated for a conventional shell. Era-defining websites such as SlashDot, the IMDB and Yahoo! (most of which are still useful today) all leveraged Perl’s flexibility and power of expression. Perl is a language that excels at text processing. Regular Expressions (regexes, the powerful pattern-matching punctuation that confounds so many who, and , but all these tools are subject to arbitrary limitations imposed by the shell. Perl achieved them much faster, and since Perl had been ported to other platforms it obviated compatibility issues across shells and architectures.