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<p>On Dec 18th, 2021, Perl turned 34!<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote" href="https://batsov.com/articles/2021/12/19/perl-turns-34/#fn:1" rel="footnote">1</a></sup> Here’s how it all started:</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p><strong>a “replacement” for awk and sed</strong></p>
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<p>[ Perl is kind of designed to make awk and sed semi-obsolete. This posting
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will include the first 10 patches after the main source. The following
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description is lifted from Larry’s manpage. –r$ ]</p>
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<p>Perl is a interpreted language optimized for scanning arbitrary text
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files, extracting information from those text files, and printing
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reports based on that information. It’s also a good language for many
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system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical
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(easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny,
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elegant, minimal). It combines (in the author’s opinion, anyway) some
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of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with
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those languages should have little difficulty with it. (Language
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historians will also note some vestiges of csh, Pascal, and even
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BASIC-PLUS.) Expression syntax corresponds quite closely to C
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expression syntax. If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed
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or awk or sh, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little
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faster, and you don’t want to write the silly thing in C, then perl may
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be for you. There are also translators to turn your sed and awk
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scripts into perl scripts.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>Perl has a very special place in my heart, as it was one of the first programming languages that I learned in the early days of my career. In 2005 I was even teaching Perl to students at the Technical University of Sofia, which was my very first experience as an educator. Perl taught me a lot about the virtues of programming, text processing, regular expressions, scripting and writing unreadable code. I wouldn’t be the same programmer (person?) without it!</p>
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<p>I still remember fondly the days when web development was all about CGI and Perl!
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While the language lost traction in recent years, I think that its legacy in alive and well - most notably as a replacement for <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">sed</code> and <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">awk</code>, and in Ruby.<sup id="fnref:2"><a class="footnote" href="https://batsov.com/articles/2021/12/19/perl-turns-34/#fn:2" rel="footnote">2</a></sup> Happy birthday, Perl!</p>
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<div class="footnotes">
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<ol>
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<li id="fn:1">
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<p>Depending on what you consider the birthday, that is. The first Perl commit was on Dec 18, 1987, but Perl 1.0 was released on Feb 1, 1988. <a class="reversefootnote" href="https://batsov.com/articles/2021/12/19/perl-turns-34/#fnref:1">↩</a></p>
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</li>
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<li id="fn:2">
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<p>Not to mention the countless other programming languages that have modeled their regular expression support after Perl. <a class="reversefootnote" href="https://batsov.com/articles/2021/12/19/perl-turns-34/#fnref:2">↩</a></p>
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</li>
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</ol>
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</div> |