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Perl, the Glue That Holds the Internet (and SN) Together, Turns 30 This Year

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday October 12 2017, @01:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the There’s-more-than-one-way-to-do-it,-but-sometimes-consistency-is-not-a-bad-thing-either dept.

canopic jug writes:

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.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:16AM (3 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:16AM (#580946) Journal

    Exactly.

    It doesn't take that long to train someone to use Perl, because there are so many examples laying around to borrow from.

    Its really not that complex. You aren't going to put that new hire to work launching rockets for SpaceX right away.

    You don't HAVE to write obfuscated code or exercise every function in the library just because its there.
    You can write simple code, easy to understand, that you will look back on and chuckle about, until you look at the date you
    wrote it an realize its been in production long than your first born, now college sophomore, has been alive.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
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  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @09:50AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @09:50AM (#581058)

    It's not "laying", you asshat American.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @12:15PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @12:15PM (#581097)

    It's not "laying", you asshat American!