It also didn’t hurt that Perl is a friendly language. C is complex and can produce security problems (especially with untrusted data), Tcl can be awkward, and Python didn’t really have a foothold. More importantly, Perl was appreciably better than the alternatives at the time when people needed something to use. Why did Perl become so popular when the Web came along? Two reasons: First, most of what is being done on the Web happens with text, and is best done with a language that’s designed for text processing. Since then, it has moved into a several other areas: automating system administration, acting as glue between different computer systems, web programming, bioinformatics, data munging, and even application development. It was first developed by Larry Wall, a linguist working as a systems administrator for NASA in the late 1980s, as a way to make report processing easier. Perl is the Swiss Army chainsaw of programming languages: powerful and adaptable. A Beginner’s Introduction to Perl Web Programming demonstrates how to write web programs. A Beginner’s Introduction to Files and Strings with Perl 5.10 explains how to use files and strings, and A Beginner’s Introduction to Regular Expressions with Perl 5.10 explores regular expressions, matching, and substitutions. Doug Sheppard First, a Little Sales PitchĮditor’s note: this series is based on Doug Sheppard’s Beginner’s Introduction to Perl.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |