25 Years of Perl

[Andrew Savige]

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"

Great idea.

An amusing anecdote from the very early days that illustrates how
Perl attracted some of its early users is that merlyn relentlessly
answered requests for Unix sed, awk, and shell help with snippets
of *Perl* code. Indeed, he did this so often that posters began
inserting "No Perl please" in their posts! As you might expect,
that served only to increase the volume of Perl snippet responses.

Because merlyn knew shell, sed and awk so well, he could answer
questions in the requested language ... and then compare and
contrast with a more elegant Perl solution.

BTW, I believe this at least partly explains why merlyn formed
part of the 2.7% who voted _against_ the formation of a separate
comp.lang.perl newsgroup in 1989.

The old use.perl.org links to verify this are broken unfortunately.
Though I found a wayback machine link:

http://web.archive.org/web/20041225063326/http://use.perl.org/comments.pl?sid=10975&cid=16619

Oh, and here is a (hopefully not broken) link to the original 1989
vote for comp.lang.perl, carried by 205 votes to 7:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/news.groups/bjii5Z9iJgY/RgAl62J00OUJ

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