25 Years of Perl

[Dave Cross]

Quoting Andrew Savige <ajsavige at yahoo.com.au>:

> 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

Thanks. I remember reading most of that before.

> 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

That, however, I hadn't thought of tracking down. Brilliant. Thank you!

Dave...