“Larry Rosler was both editor of the draft standard and
chairman of the Language Subcommittee for X3J11. He helped put
‘ANSI’ in front of C. He is also just another Perl hacker.
Larry recently took time out of his busy schedule to share his
thoughts on the value of standards, how Sun ought to handle Java
and optimizing Perl code….”
“When did you run into Perl? What did you think of the language
the first time you saw it?
“LR: I am a relative latecomer to Perl. I was experimenting with
CGI programming using shell scripts (!) because they were better
for rapid prototyping than C, with which I was most expert. Soon I
discovered that Perl offered similar advantages as the shell, but
was much more expressive (particular in the manipulation of data
structures) and much faster to execute (because of execution after
compilation, instead of interpretation)”
“Because of my extensive use of Unix commands such as ‘sed’,
which made heavy use of regular expressions, and because of my C
experience, I was quite comfortable with Perl syntax. The hardest
adjustment was to learn to write code with as few Perl operations
as possible, because of the costs of dispatching each instruction.
The Benchmark module became the most important tool I used to learn
how to write efficient (and hence, sometimes elegant) Perl.”