25 Years of Perl

[Dave Cross]

Quoting Abigail <abigail at abigail.be>:

> On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 05:29:29PM +0000, Dave Cross wrote:
>> At the LPW on Saturday I'm giving a talk entitled "25 Years of Perl".
>>
>> I have the structure of the talk, and I have worked out most of the
>> things that I want to cover. But I wanted to make sure that I didn't
>> miss anything important.
>>
>> So I thought I'd turn to the london.pm hivemind. What parts of Perl's
>> history do you think are important. I'm particularly interested in two
>> areas.
>>
>> 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?
>
> While not a CPAN module, Matt's script archive needs to be mentioned.
> Althought it contained a lot of bad code, it certainly contributed to
> the notion that Perl was *the* web language.

I has already swallowed my pride and added Matt's scripts to the list :-/

>> 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?
>
> Conferences that need mentioning: TPC, German Perl Workshop (first Perl
> conference outside of TPC), YAPC, OSCON. And, considering where
> you're going to give the presentation: LPW. 2000 may be an interesting
> year: at YAPC::NA 19100, we saw the birth of YAS, the Perl 6 movement
> started at TPC 2000, and the first non-NA YAPC was held in London.

Yep. Got all of those. Need to check the date of the first German Perl  
Workshop - but I know that's on their web site.

>> It's slightly unfortunate that I've only been involved with Perl for
>> about 60% of its lifetime. So anything you can share from the first ten
>> years or so of Perl's existence would be *really* appreciated.
>
> I started using Perl in 1995, when the main focus on the community was
> on Usenet. At that time, it was just comp.lang.perl; the split into
> multiple groups was either late 1995, or early 1996. I first joined a
> Perl IRC channel in 1997, but I don't know when that channel started.
> But it was this channel that made YAPC happen (well, it was Kevin that
> did the work, but if it wasn't for the IRC channel, there would not have
> been demand, or participants for the first YAPC).

Interesting. I can't remember when I first joined a Perl IRC channel.  
Maybe 1998/9.

> I would love to hear your presentation, unfortunally, I couldn't get a
> trip to LPW funded.

That's a shame. I don't know whether it'll be filmed. Perhaps I'll put  
together a screencast later on.

Dave...