If you were a Unix programmer you either programmed in C or shell. And there really wasn't much in between. There were these little languages that we used on top of shell, but that was the big divide. The big revelation that hatched Perl, as it were, was that this opened up into a two-dimensional space. And C was good at something I like to call manipulexity, that is the manipulation of complex things. While shell was good at something else which I call whipuptitude, the aptitude for whipping things up.
So Perl was hatched. As a small egg. That was Perl 1. And it was designed from the very beginning to evolve. The fact that we put sigils in front of the variables meant that the namespaces were protected from new keywords. And that was intentional, so we could evolve the language fairly rapidly without impacting.
And it evolved… And it evolved… And finally we got to Perl 5. And… So… Perhaps the Perl 6 slogan should be "All Your Paradigms Are Belong To Us". We'll get to that.
| Author | Larry Wall |
| Work | Present Continuous, Future Perfect |
| Published | 2008-07-04 |