December 18th Perl language turned 26 years old

26 years ago, in December 1987, Larry Wall released the first version of the language in an unsuspecting world. Link to the usenet comp.sources.unix group , where perl is first mentioned as a replacement for awk and sed.

In addition, we can say that perl gave sysadmins more options than the shell, and an easier way to achieve the goal than C.

Then, when interactive sites began to appear, perl staked out a niche for himself in this field. It would be hard to make websites on CGI using shell scripts or writing request processing and working with text in C.

Perl's famous motto is “there are always several ways to achieve something,” because perl demonstrates well that you can find good solutions for any task if you look at them from a different angle.



The success of the language had a negative impact on him - many programmers sacrificed the readability of the code for the sake of being able to do something quickly,

Perl has a lot of borrowing, but it also served as a prototype and a competitor to other languages, forcing them to develop further. Where would php be without perl? Would he at all? And ruby ​​with python, or new go? Yes, even Javascript ...

Having matured, perl acquired huge communities of enthusiasts, developed a modern style .

perl is probably not the only tool at your disposal. Maybe you do not use it at all. But over these 26 years, he has not only influenced many of the tools that you (if you are a programmer) use every day, but also the worldview itself and how you solve modern problems.

Congratulations, and we wish to live and live at least as much again.