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from the There’s-more-than-one-way-to-do-it,-but-sometimes-consistency-is-not-a-bad-thing-either dept.
Ruth Holloway at Red Hat's marketing site, OpenSource.com, has a retrospective on three decades of perl covering some history and a few of the top user groups. The powerful and flexible scripting language perl turns 30 at the end of this year. It is a practical extraction and reporting language widely used even today and has a dedicated community. It's ease of use and power made it the go-to tool through the boom of the 90's and 00's when the WWW was growing exponentially. However, its flexible syntax, while often an advantage, also functions as a sort of Rorschach test. One that some programmers fail. Perhaps two of its main strengths are pattern matching and CPAN. The many, mature perl modules available from CPAN make it a first choice for many when needed to draft something quickly or deal with a quick task.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Appalbarry on Thursday October 12 2017, @01:37AM (1 child)
1) To canopic jug and the eds - THIS is the kind of article summary I love to see. Short, entertaining, and answered all of the questions that a newcomer might have.
2) To everyone else, make sure to go and read the excellent article linked from the summary. [opensource.com] It's that good.
3) Opensource.com may be Red Hat's "marketing site," but I love their email newsletter. There's always at least one or two links worth clicking through.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 12 2017, @10:47AM
Good articles on code don't come around that often, and summarizing them freehand this way takes a lot of time. And you can get something wrong, or be less clear than some demand, and the discussion then revolves around how much the submission sucks, how stupid the submitter is, and how worthless SN is because of it. It is demotivating for an all-volunteer, community-run site.
In a perfect world the subject matter experts in the community would submit articles with summaries like these, written freehand with reasonable accuracy.
Washington DC delenda est.