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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.

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: 2) by canopic jug on Thursday October 12 2017, @08:07AM

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 12 2017, @08:07AM (#581028) Journal

    *Convenient* and *powerful* regular expression support only became widespread after Perl popularized it.

    Regardless of the path that perl takes from now on, this popularization of pattern matching has been of lasting benefit. SNOBOL4 had, until relatively recently, more powerful pattern matching that was also rather convenient despite the otherwise archaic nature of the language. However, it was abandoned by some of its key delelopers around the time networked computing started to take off at research institutions. So it was not able to adapt or popularize pattern matching. Icon never took off for other reasons. That left an unfilled need for a language with good pattern matching. These languages specialized in pattern matching because there has been a need for it.

    So not only was there a need, there was a vacuum for perl to fill. The fact that it showed up around the time that networked computing grew only helped ensure that it was in place by the time the WWW hit its stride. Then, as you point out, it excels at processing text and the WWW being text made it a perfect match. So I'd add that as a fourth factor in addition to being in the right place at the right time at the right price.

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