Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials, Second Edition

In the Beginning . . .

Let’s pause and consider Perl development up to that fateful meeting. Perl 6 is just another link in the chain. The motivations behind it and the directions it will take are partially guided by history.

Perl was first developed in 1987 by Larry Wall while he was working as a programmer for Unisys. After creating a configuration and monitoring system for a network that spanned the two American coasts, he was faced with the task of assembling usable reports from log files scattered across the network. The available tools simply weren’t up to the job. A linguist at heart, Larry set out to create his own programming language, which he called perl. He released the first version of Perl on December 18, 1987. He made it freely available on Usenet (this was before the Internet took over the world, remember), and quickly a community of Perl programmers grew.

The early adopters of Perl were system administrators who had hit the wall with shell scripting, awk, and sed. However, in the mid-1990s Perl’s audience exploded with the advent of the Web, as Perl was tailor-made for CGI scripting and other web-related programming.

Meantime, the Perl language itself kept growing, as Larry and others kept adding new features. Probably the most revolutionary change in Perl (until Perl 6, of course) was the addition of modules and object-oriented programming with Perl 5. Although this made the transition period from Perl 4 to Perl 5 unusually long, it breathed new life into the language ...