25 Years of Perl

[Randy J. Ray]

> 1/ Technical
>
> What CPAN modules deserve to be mentioned as part of Perl's history?
> Which Perl infrastructure projects are (or were) important? Are there
> any other technical things that need to be covered?

I'd be sure to mention the strong role Perl played in the emergence of 
CGI applications-- both the Perl 4 cgilib.pl and Perl 5's CGI.pm. I came 
in to Perl just a year or two before 5.000 rolled out, so I can't talk 
to much from the pre-5 era. (My job at the time was using Perl on a 
large scale to do software configuration management (20+ application 
scripts, 15+ libraries, ~70,000 LOC), which I ended up transitioning 
from Perl 4 to Perl 5.)

> 2/ Community
>
> What community initiatives should I cover? Can I mention TPI without
> giving some people nightmares? How much detail can I cover about Perl
> Mongers? Which conferences deserve a mention? Does anyone remember how
> and when YAS became TPF?

Don't forget The Perl Journal. Not only was it a useful resource, it 
gave a number of people a leg up into going from just using Perl, to 
writing about it and becoming more active members of the community as a 
result. At least, that was the case with me-- Jon Orwant invited me to 
write about AutoLoader/AutoSplit after I'd done some work fleshing out 
the docs for the core, and that directly led into writing more, and 
eventually becoming a CPAN contributor, book author, etc.

Randy
-- 
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Randy J. Ray      Sunnyvale, CA      http://www.rjray.org 
rjray at blackperl.com
 
twitter.com/rjray
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