Perl исполнилось 25 лет (18th December 1987)

[x-yuri]

The First Twenty-Five Years

Не то чтобы очень интересная статья, но некоторые моменты мне были интересны:

Camelia
In creating the logo for Perl 6 Larry Wall drew inspiration from the people he always intended to target. Larry would love to see a new generation of programmers in our world, he would love to see a new generation of inventors, his aim was to be friendly and encouraging and with her bright colours Camelia certainly addresses those concerns.
There is also for me an interesting parable in the choice of a butterfly for Perl 6 as the butterfly is an example of a morphic creature. The butterfly has passed through an intermediary, chrysalis, phase and changes from an earth bound crawling insect into a beautiful creature of flight. What better metaphor for the creation of a language from one base system into something else?

CPAN
With the release of Perl 5 in 1994 a new boundary was made between the code of the past, Perl 4, and that of the future. This was complemented by the creation of Perl's largest resource the mighty Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. CPAN is the largest archive of its type and has been emulated in other scripting languages to varying degrees of success. It is a resource where code authors can request an account, Pause Account, and then upload or contribute to code that is in the archive. CPAN predates GitHub by many years and was the model for how one joined a project by being awarded a commit-bit, or co-maint of a module or script.

https://metacpan.org/
http://mapofcpan.org/
http://vimeo.com/51893508

I have mentioned that the Perl community and ecosystem varies from other languages in some ways, or more likely evolved earlier due to its maturity. One of the major differences is in the testing culture, this is not to suggest that other languages do not have such a culture, but that they do not have a culture like the one in Perl.
The testing culture of Perl has led to a vast range of modules and systems that help programmers to develop competent code that is feature rich but also complete in its quality. To begin we created the Test Anything Protocol (TAP) which by its name suggests that testing is prevalent, many projects are not prototyped in code but defined in tests, we also use methods such as test-driven deployment.

CPAN Testers
In 1998 Graham Barr and Chris Nandor conceived the system that is CPAN Testers. This important group takes every module uploaded to CPAN and runs it against every operating system and version of Perl that it will be deployed against, this generates a report of any issues which is automatically reported to the author of the module. This system is repeated to ensure that any changes or evolutions in code are accounted for. This is a high degree of quality control that produces hundreds of thousands of reports each month, there are currently over 26 million reports.

So what does the future hold for Perl? Well I don't have a crystal ball but I cannot see the language fading from usage in the next quarter century, the truth of the matter is that even though there are languages that can do some of the things that Perl does, some of them do some things better, others do things Perl wasn't designed for, there is no language that has been designed to do the things that Perl is very good at doing. No language in the current scripting languages seems to have the flexibility, maturity and extensibility of Perl. The main power of Perl has always been its ability to quickly adapt, and be adapted, to suit purposes. It has been referred to as glue, as tape, as a Swiss Army Knife with a chainsaw attachment, as a command line processing language. The truth is that it is all of these and more.

The power of Perl is that it does not limit your expectations, it doesn't control your involvement, to some this is a scary prospect, to those who understand that there are protocols and methods for controlling and throttling that power Perl becomes a set of tools and the toolbox that holds them.