Perl essays

Perl essays Living in an age of technology, the world is constantly coming up with new ways to make our lives easier (or sometimes more complex depending on how you look at it). Now with the help of the open source community, programming languages are blossoming from a small idea of a lonely programmer. Perl, a specialized language invented by Larry Wall, is a language that flourished in the hands of open source contributors. While working for the National Security Agency on a project known as Blacker Larry Wall created Perl. He was trying to produce some reports from a Usenet-news-like hierarchy of files for a bug-reporting system and the language he was using, awk, ran out of steam. He explained Perls beginnings as follows: The Beginnings of Perl were directly inspired by running into a problem I couldnt solve with the tools I had. Or rather, that I couldnt easily solve. As the Apostle Paul so succinctly put it, All things are possible, but not all things are expedient. I could have solved my problem with awk and shell eventually, but I possess a fortuitous surplus of the three chief virtues of a programmer: Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. I was too lazy to do it in awk because it would have been hard to get awk to jump through the hoops I was wanting it to jump through. I was too impatient to wait for awk to finish because it was so slow. And finally, I had the hubris to think I could do better. (Knapen 1) Although the Blacker project has long since died, Perl continues to grow and change in many ways. Larry Wall, the son of a pastor, majored in Natural and Artificial languages and attended graduate school in linguistics. This focus on languages and their structures helped Wall understand the needs of a text crunching programming language. Perl itself was created and continues evolving by combining features from C, sh, csh, grep, sed, awk, Fortran, COBOL, PL/...