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Perl Programming

Perl is Sweet Sixteen 352

Posted by michael 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."
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Perl is Sweet Sixteen More

Perl is Sweet Sixteen

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  • Happy Birthday Perl (Score:4, Funny)

    by James in Iowa ( 540361 ) <james-chapman@NOSpam.uiowa.edu> on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:15AM (#7771730)
    For once the "you belong in a zoo" version of Happy Birthday is applicable.

  • But too old... (Score:5, Funny)

    by mikewren420 ( 264173 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:15AM (#7771732) Homepage
    But too old for Michael Jackson. Go ahead, mod me down! Muahahaha! ;)

  • 16 huh? (Score:5, Funny)

    by jimi1283 ( 699887 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:16AM (#7771733)
    Better lock up the car keys...
  • Dam I feel old.

    I remember 87 like yesterday. I remember writing 87 for the date instead of 88 on my homework. Actually come to think of it, I was in 4th grade and now am in my mid 20's. Hmmmm

    Maybe it was that long ago and time is just going by too fast.

    I wrote my first hello world program usinb IBM BasicA then.

  • At long last... (Score:5, Funny)

    by siokaos ( 107110 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:16AM (#7771736) Homepage
    At long last. PERL is legal!

  • Never been kissed? (Score:5, Funny)

    by DaLiNKz ( 557579 ) * on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:16AM (#7771737) Homepage Journal
    Only 2 more years until shes legal, boys ;)
    • Perl.com is registered in Colorado, where the legal age is 15, so long as you're no more than ten years older than Perl. If you are, you've only got one more year to wait - she'll be full legal at 17.

  • and also (Score:3, Funny)

    by prof187 ( 235849 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:16AM (#7771738) Homepage
    it's no longer considered statutory...

  • Perl Drivers License (Score:5, Funny)

    by SeanTobin ( 138474 ) * <byrdhuntr AT hotmail DOT com> on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:19AM (#7771752)
    I could just imagine the kind of drivers license issued to Perl. First off, it would have a magnetic stripe, barcode, brail, and RFID encoded driver's license number on the back. The photo would be in the visual, infra-red, and ultraviolet spectrums. The license itself would be an actual 4d hypercube turning into your social security card, credit cards, gas cards, library cards, and translations of all the above into every language depending on the licenses orientation in space-time. In the event of emergency, the license would also be a flotation device and in the rare case of ending up on a desert island can be turned into a Swiss army knife and satellite GSM phone with GPS capabilities. Biometric identification built into the license allows it to change into the proper license for whoever is holding it. The license would be powered by a kinetic energy system similar to no-wind watches. It would also have a backup fusion generator, solar cells, hydrogen fuel cells, lithium ion battery banks, and be expandable for anti-mater generators once they become available.

    Then you would lose it and it would be eaten by a snake.

  • Yes but... (Score:5, Funny)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:19AM (#7771753)
    Happy birthday Perl! You are now old enough to get a US drivers license.

    Yes. but it's only allowed to execute code until 11pm...and its parents damn well better not find out that it forks around, because it needs parental permission to kill a child process(should it fail to handle variables safely.)

    Oh, and the kernel keeps a shotgun by the front door just in case any Java applets come around asking if Perl can go to the movies...

  • license? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Coneasfast ( 690509 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:22AM (#7771766)
    Happy birthday Perl! You are now old enough to get a US drivers license

    hmm... i didn't know you needed a license to ride a camel

  • Sweet 16... (Score:5, Funny)

    by oGMo ( 379 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:24AM (#7771777)

    Keep It Simple Stupid.

    I guess we really can say Perl is sweet 16, never been KISS'd.

    ;-)

  • Thank you Larry!! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ars-Fartsica ( 166957 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:28AM (#7771798)
    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.

    • Re:Thank you Larry!! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by eggboard ( 315140 ) * on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:50AM (#7771892) Homepage
      I keep giving money to the Perl Foundation among various other charitable donations because a significant minority of the money I earn each year is directly related to my ability to use perl to run the projects. If I hadn't learned perl in 1994 and become better at it over the years, I'd have had to get a real job! Thanks, Larry!

    • Re:Thank you Larry!! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by GCP ( 122438 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @02:47AM (#7772061)
      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.

      • 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.

        Hey everyone! He said perl! We have to say Python! Python Python Python!

        Everyone knows that Python has vastly outstriped perl in inane slashdot comments, and we can expect more to come in the future.

        Java, and now PHP, have eroded Perl's popularity in an area it once almost monopolized: Web apps.

        Yeah, and does anyone have some recommendations

      • Re:Thank you Larry!! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by iantri ( 687643 )
        Well, C is 31 years old and C++ is 17, so don't give up on Perl yet..

    • Re:Thank you Larry!! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Camel Pilot ( 78781 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @03:28AM (#7772173) Homepage Journal
      Well I can't speak for a retirement but Perl has put food on my table and provided many enjoyable hours of application development.

      Somewhere I came across a quote by Larry to the effect that greatness is measured by the degree of freedom you give to others and not by how much you coerce others into doing what you want. If that is your measure (it has become mine!) Larry you have achieved greatness.

  • Happy B- (Score:4, Funny)

    by Le Marteau ( 206396 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:48AM (#7771882) Journal
    "Perl looks like an explosion at an ASCII factory" - I forget who said that.

    Here's a fun one. (Forgive me, I've had one too many Jack and Cokes). In VIM, enter :help the damned.

    It'll come back with "There is no help for the damned"

    Har har har. THat kills me. Time for another drink.

  • Hmmm (Score:4, Funny)

    by TheSpoom ( 715771 ) * <slashdot&uberm00,net> on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:52AM (#7771901) Homepage Journal
    Maybe it can finally learn to speak english then ;^)

    • Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Funny)

      by Le Marteau ( 206396 )
      You mean, like this: (written by someone else)

      #!/usr/local/src/perl4.003/perl

      a happy greeting");
      time, to, join (@the, flock(with, $relaxed), values %and_have_fun);
      connect(with_old, $friends);
      rename($myself, $name = "ilyn");
      $attend, local($parties);

      pack(food, and, games);
      wait; for (it) {;};

      goto party;
      open Door;
      send(greetings, to, hosts, guests);
      party:

      tell stories;
      listen(to_stories, at . length);
      read(comics, $philosophy, $games);

      seek(partners, $for, $fun);
      select(with), caution;
      each %seeks, %joy;

      $consu
  • Perl turned 16 2 days ago, on Dec. 18th.

    Happy belated birthday, anyway.

    My IT career started out with Perl on Linux. Thank you.
  • I thought this was going to be about Woz's Sweet-16 interpreter [oldcomputers.net] for the Apple II (see bottom of that page), but no luck. I guess it's about 28 years old now....

    darn, I dated myself.

  • Age of consent! (Score:5, Funny)

    by charlie763 ( 529636 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @02:03AM (#7771938)
    This means that Pearl is also legal [ageofconsent.com] to have sex with in most states. So, if you want to give Pearl a "pearl necklace," go right ahead. Just make sure there is no drinking involved as that might jam you up with the law

  • Why not interpreted C++, instead? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @02:05AM (#7771943) Homepage

    Suppose Larry had used his considerable brainpower to make an interpreted version of C or C++, instead of making a completely new language?
    • They had plenty of them back in the 80's and may some may still be around. At least I know when Java first came out in 95, it was benchmarked by programs using interpreted C compared with a rewritten versions for Java.

      Supprisingly Java kicked its butt, regardless of how slow it feels.

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

      If he had done that, then the only clever one-liner you could write would be:

      #include <stdio.h>

    • Re:Why not interpreted C++, instead? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Alioth ( 221270 ) <no@spam> on Saturday December 20, 2003 @06:43AM (#7772517) Journal
      Because it's pointless?

      Perl is a different tool to C and C++ not because it's interpreted, but because of its language features. It's also (IMHO) a much more expressive language than C or C++, and has quite a few features that these languages lack (for instance, to have dynamic binding for new() in C++ requires a very ugly hack - see James O. Coplien's 'advanced C++ programming idioms' book for details), where Perl does this sort of thing with ease.

      • 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 [root.cern.ch] C/C++ Interpreter.

        I think it would be great if GCC [gnu.org] 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

  • my first real success (Score:5, Interesting)

    by b17bmbr ( 608864 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @02:06AM (#7771946)
    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.

  • I'm sorry.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by mog007 ( 677810 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <700goM>> on Saturday December 20, 2003 @02:16AM (#7771970)
    I couldn't afford a car for you to drive, but I have this really nice camel, chicks dig a camel.

  • 16 years, wow! (Score:5, Funny)

    by MisterFancypants ( 615129 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @02:22AM (#7771979)
    About the same amount of time it will take them to finish Perl 6!

  • Sixteen? Perl just graduated to two hex digits. (Score:5, Funny)

    by IvyMike ( 178408 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @02:26AM (#7771989)
    It's an important milestone...0x10 years old! Whoo-hoo!

  • Larry Wall's first mention of Perl on Usenet (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kickstart70 ( 531316 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @02:30AM (#7772006) Homepage
    ...that I could find on Google...

    (the bold was added by me)

    here [google.com]

    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. :-)

  • US Driver's License (Score:4, Informative)

    by ari_j ( 90255 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @02:34AM (#7772021)
    You forget - we're the United States of America, that's states plural. The state I grew up in (and no, not that long ago) issued me a driver's license when I was not quite 14 years old. And some states require you to be 18 or something like that. It really seems incongruent, until you look at the reasoning. In extremely rural states, it's hard to operate the family farm if the kids can't drive.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @02:48AM (#7772064)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • 16 eh (Score:2, Funny)

    by CavemanKiwi ( 559158 )
    I'd hit it /bugger this isn't FARK :(
  • Just this week I purchased Learning Perl 3rd edition. This is my first attempt at programming. As a systems admin I think perl will really help me out day to day. I have heard pros and cons to Perl as a first programming language but would love to hear the /. perspective.

    • Re:Perl may be old but it's new to me (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Juanvaldes ( 544895 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @03:50AM (#7772202)
      I feels it's just as good as any other as a first language. From my perspective about all you get at first regardless of language is just a notion of variables, control structures and functions. New programmers never use the special features of whatever language they are on at the time as they don't know how to properly use them quiet yet. Once you feel you have the basics down all you need to learn going to other langues is some syntax. Good luck, have fun and don't give up. :)

      • Re:Perl may be old but it's new to me (Score:5, Interesting)

        by morganjharvey ( 638479 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @07:04AM (#7772555)
        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?

  • 16-year-olds... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Dwonis ( 52652 ) * on Saturday December 20, 2003 @03:26AM (#7772164)
    Maybe by the time Perl is 30, it (he? she?) will have mellowed out and won't be quite as unruly as it is now...

  • Pefect (Score:5, Funny)

    by jeeryg_flashaccess ( 456261 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @03:44AM (#7772193) Homepage Journal
    So by sweet sixteen you are implying that a language that many geeks use is female? this makes sense now.

    touch perl
    finger perl
    mount perl

  • #!/usr/local/bin/perl (Score:4, Informative)

    by Michael.Forman ( 169981 ) * on Saturday December 20, 2003 @04:48AM (#7772291) Homepage Journal

    I've been programming perl for almost a decade, after learning it for a system administration job at UnixOps [unixops.com] at the University of Colorado.

    For those who work in Linux, Unix, or MacOS, I have a useful collection [michael-forman.com] of well documented perl scripts for manipulating data and metadata from the command line.

    Most useful are newpl [michael-forman.com], which creates a full-featured template as a starting point for new perl scripts, and ren-regexp [michael-forman.com] which can manipulate filenames on the command line using a chain of regular expressions. Happy birthday perl!

    Michael. [michael-forman.com]

  • so, when is Perl going to die()? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I like perl, use it every day, but any language that allows source code like this [cpan.org] should be, like, banned by the government or something, shouldn't it??

  • Perl is *NOT* Sweet Sixteen (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fynfuqbg ( 522423 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @05:21AM (#7772379)
    Sweet Sixteen is an older computer language designed by Steve Wozniak (see http://oldcomputers.net/byteappleII.html [oldcomputers.net] and http://www.fadden.com/dl-apple2/sweet16.txt [fadden.com]) for the apple ][ and is a little less bloated [uiowa.edu] than Perl.

  • And like a typical 16-year-old... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Green Light ( 32766 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @09:11AM (#7772750) Journal
    ...I can't understand a thing that it is saying!

    Not trolling! I love Perl dearly 8^)

  • In Pennsylvania, (Score:3, Funny)

    by Vegeta99 ( 219501 ) <rjlynn.gmail@com> on Saturday December 20, 2003 @06:00PM (#7775123)
    Perl would now be allowed to work until midnight on school nights, and 1AM on Fridays and Saturdays. Perl could also work up to 44 hours a week, and his employers would probably take full advantage of this.

    However, even though Perl can work until midnight or 1AM, he can't drive for another six months.

    He's now completely legal in PA. If he ever decides to hookup with C, it's all OK.

    Still no booze, smokes, or voting. Gotta wait for that.

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