Cameron Laird's personal notes on Perl
[Fold in published pieces.]
Personal statement
Perl is the most theoretical
language.
Here's what I mean:
- Perl is practical. It takes good theory to be practical,
so, ipso facto, Perl has good theory.
More concretely,
- Perl's theory is vividly attested. Generally "language theory"
has to do with axiomatizations and rigorizations, leading to
dataflow languages, or functional languages, or languages
characterized by tiny, precisely orthogonal syntaxes, ease
of verifiability, and so on. Perl notoriously annoys acolytes
of
Scheme or
Eiffel or J or ML, for these are not its primary
aims. What Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Randal Schwartz,
and others, have
provided, though, is an extensive analysis of the human-factors
dimensions that most dominate usability in the real world
(the real world of software delivery, that is), and detailed
explanations of how Perl fits the prescription. The Perl
Cabal is remarkable for the volume of its persuasive postings
to comp.lang.perl and elsewhere. Two examples from early
1996 are Christiansen's piece on
why Perl regexp-s are better than regular, and ?'s on
chunking. I'm also fond of the
Perl versus
the world compendium.
- Larry Wall has give a few interviews which are available
online, including ones for
Dr.
Dobb's Journal,
Linux
Journal (including the classic,
"the NSA knows everyone uses Perl")
and SunWorld Online. Maya Stodte's flattering
profile
is rich with accurate and pertinent detail.
Larry pushes this so far as to
call Perl the only
postmodern(ist) language (so far).
I like the O'Reilly essay on the
importance
of Perl.
Perl 5.0 is plenty object-orient-able through its package facility.
See the perlref, perlobj, and perlbot document pages for examples.
Perl tutorials:
Perl
in Ten Minutes;
Meet
Perl;
and
Virtual
Perl.
Windows!Perl
...
Nathan Torkington wrote a great
"Lies We Tell".
On-line resources
Tops is, of course,
The Perl Institute.
A
commercial perspective on most of
the same material appears as the
Programming Republic of Perl.
Todd Hoff
makes available a delightful page of
Perl
Resources and Reviews.
Most important for the daily work of
building useful applications, though, is
CPAN.
A
searchable
perl 5.0 manual is now available.
The Perl Journal
I like Bob McMillan's
interview
with Tim O'Reilly and Larry.
We've recently written on
MacPerl,
Perl architectures,
scripting Web applications, ...
Cameron
Laird's notes on
Perl/claird@phaseit.net