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Salon 21st: The joy of Perl

An old Salon article about Larry Wall and the origins of Perl. Bold words, about changing the culture of computing. And what car he drives.

Such flame wars are a favorite hobby for hackers who are fond of declaiming in terms that allow no wiggle room -- ambiguity being foreign to the fundamental either/or, yes/no, zero/one digitalness of the computing universe. But Wall and Perl are all about wiggle room, about messy imperfection and fuzzy creativity. After all, duct tape is valuable not because it offers a perfect solution to your plumbing problems, but because it gets the job done. Perl, to some eyes, may not seem elegant. But that's not Wall's concern. His humble goal is to be useful, to help people do what they need to do -- to facilitate the interconnection of programming languages, hardware platforms, assorted software universes and people working together into one cosmic entity. Which, if you think about it, is what the Web is all about, too. It's no accident that Perl, which Wall first invented more than a decade ago, didn't really start to explode until the Web took off in 1994. The Web is a hacked-together, messy, ad-hoc creation that requires fast thinking and faster reaction times. Perl is a Web hacker's best friend.

The third part of this article describes in detail what made me bond with Perl. This quote sums the power of Perl up pretty darn good IMHO:

I realized at that point that there was a huge ecological niche between the C language and Unix shells, says Wall. C was good for manipulating complex things -- you can call it 'manipulexity.' And the shells were good at whipping up things -- what I call 'whipupitude.' But there was this big blank area where neither C nor shell were good, and that's where I aimed Perl.

Salon 21st | The joy of Perl

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