Perl, the first postmodern computer language Mar 11, 1999, 00 :04 UTC (4 Talkback[s]) (5076 reads) (Other stories by Larry Wall)
Larry Wall's talk at Linux World on Wednesday, March 3. He explains why Perl is a fitting language for the postmodern era. As a member of the audience commented: "Another mindbender from Larry."
"When I was invited to talk here, it occurred to me that most of the people here would be more
interested in Linux than in Perl, so, in the interests of universal harmonic convergence, I thought I
should talk about both Perl and Linux. To do that, I had to figure out what Perl and Linux have in
common. Besides the obvious, of course."
"Obviously, both Perl and Linux owe a lot to Unix culture, but this is well documented. If I merely
pointed out the obvious commonalities, I'd have to talk the whole time about things you can find
out from the manuals. (Or should I say, things you ought to be able to find out from the manuals?
Whatever.)"
"I'm here to talk about why Perl and Linux have both been so successful. Note that I'm measuring
success here not so much in terms of numbers of users, but in terms of satisfaction of users."
