25 Years of Perl

[Dave Cross]

Quoting Abigail <abigail at abigail.be>:

> On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 11:22:14AM -0500, Uri Guttman wrote:
>> On 11/20/2012 11:00 AM, Dave Cross wrote:
>>> Quoting Uri Guttman <uri at stemsystems.com>:
>>>
>>>> in that vein you should also mention matt's scripts. evil code but
>>>> they helped perl gain massive numbers of users. many were kiddies but
>>>> some actually learned perl.
>>>
>>> Yes. I'm well aware of the effects of Matt's scripts. In fact I think I
>>> may have already mentioned that in this very discussion.
>>>
>>
>> you did but i didn't see that before i posted. the number of posts about
>> matt's crap on usenet was enormous. it took the community way too long
>> to rewrite them in clean safe code. that archive is now also forgotten
>> as no one seems to mention them in the age of modern perl and such.
>
>
> That's because the community missed something that the overwhelming
> majority still seems to miss: easy deployment of ready to use applications.
>
> Matt got that part right.

+1

And that's why the nms replacements are still nowhere near being  
examples of Perl best practice (even for when we wrote them in 2001).  
In order to compete with Matt's scripts they had to be usable on the  
same cheap hosting plans as the MSA scripts were. Which meant ancient  
versions of Perl and no non-core modules.

We punted a bit on that. Matt's scripts run on Perl 4. We insisted on  
5.004. That was the first version to include CGI.pm as standard.

Dave...