Computer Science & Perl Programming

Chapter 1. Introduction

Jon Orwant

“Perl is a language for getting your job done,” begins Programming Perl. As programming languages go, Perl is something of a grab bag, and so is this book.

In this introduction I’ll tell you how the book came to be, first by talking about the history of TPJ, and then about why computer science and Perl programming are a natural combination.

History of TPJ

In 1995, I was angry. Perl had broken away from being stereotyped as a system administration langauge or text processing language, and had managed to claw itself up to merely being stereotyped as a web programming language. I had seen Perl used for AI, astronomy, biology, graphics, natural language processing, and other areas—but Perl’s generality wasn’t being communicated to the programming world. Perl wasn’t getting the reputation it deserved.

So when Tom Christiansen floated the notion of a Perl newsletter on the perl5-porters mailing list, it seemed like a natural idea. I’d just seen my first Perl book printed with my ampersands translated into eights, my vertical bars translated into ones, and my bullet marks depicted as planets complete with rings. (As you might guess, the publisher wasn’t O’Reilly.) I wanted to do Perl publishing right, and at the same time show the world that Perl wasn’t just for system administration any more. And so I set to work with my NeXT workstation and a copy of Framemaker. I found a Boston area printer via the Yellow Pages, and hit up the Perl gurus for articles. I ...