As a few will have seen (I assume they look at "Newest Nodes" - and kindly upvoted some of my replies, for which many thanks), I've been posting replies to some old nodes on here. This was after deciding a couple of months ago that after looking at the front page each day and voting on various posts and replies, I'd then go back over all the nodes featuring the text "PDL" and vote on (to use the rest of that day's votes) / reply to ones where that seemed useful. I kept track of where I was up to by looking at "Nodes (I) Wrote" and seeing the date of the original thread I was replying to on my most-recent post.
Some of the things I have learned:
- of a few non-reported bugs in PDL that are now fixed
- of a few former keen PDL users who now apparently don't visit PerlMonks anymore
- back in 2001, there was a thing called "Program Design Language" which gave some false positives on my searching
- protein sequences using the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_primary_structure coding gave some false positives when folks using Perl for biology stuff included some data with the string "PDL"
- Despite PDL being around since 1997 in various forms, it only started getting discussed on here in mid-to-late 2000 or so
It's been really interesting to take this journey back through time, and see how Perl, and the PerlMonks site, and PDL have developed over time.