[rochester-pm-list] Uncultured Perl

[Shawn Porter]

Larry Wall (father of Perl)  has an awesome article about Perl in the Nov
1999 Linux Magazine.

-> http://www.linux-mag.com/1999-10/uncultured_01.html

Some excerpts:

"Like the typical human, Perl was conceived in secret, and existed for
 roughly nine months before anyone in the world ever saw it. Its womb was
 a secret project for the National Security Agency known as the "Blacker"
 project, which has long since closed down. The goal of that sexy project
 was not to produce Perl. However, Perl may well have been the most useful
 thing to come from Blacker. Sex can fool you that way."

...

"Humans do not come from the womb with the ability to drive a stick shift.
 Neither did Perl. This was intentional. I've always been smart enough to
 realize how stupid I am, and one of the things I'm stupid about is
 predicting how my programs will develop over time. So Perl was equipped
 to learn, and have a long childhood."

...

"...we really needed to have a commercially packaged version of Perl for
 the Windows folks, because many of them were (and still are) clueless
 about open source. It's almost like we're doing Windows users a favor by
 charging them money for something they could get for free, because they
 get confused otherwise."

-- 
Shawn Porter
http://www.rit.net/sporter
sporter at rit.net