25 Years of Perl

[Sam Kington]

On 20 Nov 2012, at 16:09, Dave Cross <dave at dave.org.uk> wrote:
[regarding matt's scripts]
> If anyone is unaware of the London Perl Mongers' reaction to Matt's scripts, you should probably read http://www.scriptarchive.com/nms.html


Some mention should be made also of the attempt to rewrite the entire Unix support structure in Perl - things like ls, find, head etc. I don't think this ever went very far, and it appears to be very difficult to Google if it's still around, but I remember this being important at the time.

Also, to second somebody else's point: LWP was a major step forward. I remember a Java guy at $PREVIOUS_WORK gushing about LWP's architecture - the way UserAgent and Request were separate objects, for instance.

Perl's almost fanatical dedication to cross-platform support (including some very odd-ball platforms) is worth a mention also. While I was dipping my toes in perl in 1995 or thereabouts, mostly server-side CGI scripts using cgi-lib.pl, I was also working on a RISC OS GUI interface to weblint. This wouldn't have happened if there wasn't a RISC OS port of perl. Here's the web page at the time http://web.archive.org/web/20010616180931/http://www.illuminated.co.uk/acorn/weblint/

Sam
-- 
Website: http://www.illuminated.co.uk/