What? You didn't complain that they didn't list Perl? Well
I was curious and dug up the following interesting reading
in a few minutes. I feel that there should be earlier mention but
it eluded me. No matter, these are still worth looking at:
- In a thread on what motivates a programmer, Larry
mentions Perl
and the now-famous quote "The two chief virtues in a programmer are laziness and impatience." This was in
the pre-hubris days of course.
- later in that same thread Larry is forced to give a description
of Perl (with some examples) when someone asks "So what is this program 'perl'?"
- Finally the first public distribution
of Perl 1.0 (1988-02-01 05:46:32 PST). Just seeing code in multi-part shars was a real trip down memory lane for me... I wonder if
something like that would meet their significance threshold for inclusion in their timeline?
I most want to find the actual exchange in which Andy Tanenbaum tells Linus Torvalds that he'd have
failed him (had Linus been in Andy's OS class, or country even) during a debate on the pros and cons of monolithic kernels, but
so far I've only seen a reference to the posting.
Update: Thanks ar0n! Here is the actual posting in which AST tells Linus
Be thankful you are not my student. You would not
get a high grade for such a design :-)
- he even includes a smiley. It is fascinating to re-read the exchange now, as the current hero Linus comes of as snot-nosed (albeit with some good thinking), and AST as the gracious wise man. I was
unable to find this because I felt certain that AST had used the word "fail", but now I see that he was not so harsh.
Update 2: Yes I noticed that good one jmerelo but I didn't list it as it didn't describe Perl much. Another one I ran across was this which is not much later and the .sig comment perhaps shows just how popular Perl had become in a short time. BTW some may recall Mark Biggar being referred to as "Perl's maternal uncle" for many years.
--
I'd like to be able to assign to an luser
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