25 Years of Perl

[James Laver]

On 24 Nov 2012, at 00:36, Uri Guttman <uri at stemsystems.com> wrote:

> this thread reminds me of something we need to crow about more. so many conventions, inventions, ideas have come from the perl community and then be copied/stolen/absorbed by other langs, usually without much recognition.

We do of course do the same thing back when the ideas are worth stealing.

> TAP is used everywhere now. perl invented and spread it so it is universal in the perl world.

TAP can be used certainly, but most languages have their own testing infrastructure. Most of it is pretty crap to be honest, but TAP is certainly not the only game in town. When dealing with Jenkins, for example, we have to use the JUnit harness because JUnit output is all that it understands.

> cpan is always being copied (poorly) by other langs. they just never get the community feeling of uploading to cpan as a cred and for sharing.

The actual repository, yes. The clients, well personally I think Leiningen (clojure) does a better job. Now if they could work on reducing the output like Minicpan did...

> yapc has yet to be properly copied. no one else delivers more bang for the buck and fun as well.
> 
> mjd invented lightning talks and they are at many confs now, not just lang ones. another perl invention with no credit given.

How are these perl inventions? They are community inventions.

/j