Cameron Laird's personal notes on Perl (original) (raw)

[Fold in published pieces.]

Personal statement

Perl is the most theoreticallanguage. Here's what I mean:

• Perl is practical. It takes good theory to be practical, so, ipso facto, Perl has good theory. More concretely,
• Perl's theory is vividly attested. Generally "language theory" has to do with axiomatizations and rigorizations, leading to dataflow languages, or functional languages, or languages characterized by tiny, precisely orthogonal syntaxes, ease of verifiability, and so on. Perl notoriously annoys acolytes ofScheme or Eiffel or J or ML, for these are not its primary aims. What Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Randal Schwartz, and others, have provided, though, is an extensive analysis of the human-factors dimensions that most dominate usability in the real world (the real world of software delivery, that is), and detailed explanations of how Perl fits the prescription. The Perl Cabal is remarkable for the volume of its persuasive postings to comp.lang.perl and elsewhere. Two examples from early 1996 are Christiansen's piece on why Perl regexp-s are better than regular, and ?'s on. I'm also fond of thePerl versus the world compendium.
• Larry Wall has give a few interviews which are available online, including ones forDr. Dobb's Journal,Linux Journal (including the classic, "the NSA knows everyone uses Perl") and SunWorld Online. Maya Stodte's flattering profile is rich with accurate and pertinent detail. Larry pushes this so far as tocall Perl the only postmodern(ist) language (so far).

I like the O'Reilly essay on theimportance of Perl.

Perl 5.0 is plenty object-orient-able through its package facility. See the perlref, perlobj, and perlbot document pages for examples.

Perl tutorials:Perl in Ten Minutes;Meet Perl; andVirtual Perl.

Windows!Perl

...

Nathan Torkington wrote a great "Lies We Tell".

On-line resources

Tops is, of course, The Perl Institute. A commercial perspective on most of the same material appears as theProgramming Republic of Perl.Todd Hoff makes available a delightful page ofPerl Resources and Reviews. Most important for the daily work of building useful applications, though, isCPAN.

Asearchable perl 5.0 manual is now available.

The Perl Journal

I like Bob McMillan'sinterview with Tim O'Reilly and Larry.

We've recently written onMacPerl,Perl architectures,scripting Web applications, ...

Cameron Laird's notes on Perl/claird@phaseit.net