25 Years of Perl

[Dave Cross]

Quoting "Randy J. Ray" <rjray at blackperl.com>:

>> 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.)

Yeah. I'd already got CGI.pm, but had forgotten about cgilib.pl.  
Thanks for the reminder.

>> 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.

Already got TPJ on the list. I'm pretty sure that my article in TPJ  
was the first time I was paid for writing about Perl (an article about  
Symbol::Approx::Sub - just sneaked into the last standalone issue).

Cheers,

Dave...