Masterminds of Programming

Chapter 15. Perl

Perl fans call it the “Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister” and the “Swiss-Army Chainsaw”, flaunting the motto, “There’s More Than One Way to Do It!” Creator Larry Wall sometimes describes it as a kind of glue language, originally intended as a sweet spot between the Unix shell and C to help people get things done. It incorporates linguistic principles and design decisions from Unix (and sports perhaps the largest repository of libraries of any language in the CPAN). Many programmers anxiously await the long-developed revision of Perl 6, a language designed to last at least 20 years.

The Language of Revolutions

How do you define Perl?

Larry Wall: Perl is an ongoing experiment in how best to incorporate some of the principles of natural language into computer language, not at a shallow syntactic level like COBOL, but at a much deeper pragmatic level. Some of the fundamental principles of human language are—well, here, let me paste you a list:

• Expressiveness is more important than learnability.

• It’s quite OK to speak in “baby talk” if you happen to be a baby.

• A language can be useful even before you have learned the whole language.

• There are often several good ways to say roughly the same thing.

• Every linguistic utterance gets meaning from many contexts at once.

• Your language is agnostic about which context you should optimize for today.

• Your language does not enforce any particular paradigm in exclusion to others.

• Efficient communication requires a certain amount of linguistic ...