The programmers are no longer modest anymore – maybe no one will head in Pearl

Perl was once everywhere. Or at least I felt this way. About the beginning of the millennium, almost every web site appears to be built on the back of this text programming language. It tackled huge amounts of text – the mechanisms to do so strongly and easily were part of the language – and it was used even in vital informatics, hacking and hacking through genetic data. based on One listThe companies that used Perl ranged widely: Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Deutsche Bank, Akamai, Citibank, Comcast, Morgan Stanley, Mozilla. Many Craigslist has been programmed in Perl.

Even at its peak, Pearl’s popularity was a little surprising. Pearl is an undeniable chaotic language. It is often referred to as an “Internet adhesive tape”, with programmers joking it “Writing onlyLanguage: Write in it, but you rarely read it (at least successfully).

There is a mixture of combination of Berl, all in the service of its logo: “There is more than one way to do this.” Just as there are synonyms in English, Per has a variety of styles to write the same thing. While this is a somewhat common feature of programming languages, Pearl seems to want to knock on to the head. There are multiple ways, for example, in writing conditional data, from the use of the traditional “IF” to “unless”; To write an IF statement back in one line; Even for a three -part operator includes a question mark and a saying. I have a distinctive memory, in the early first decade of the twentieth century, from writing the code in Pearl one day, and the next day I do not understand what I wrote.

But this chaos and Baroque is actually intended and part of the broader philosophy behind Pearl. The creator of the language, Larry Wall, was trained in linguistics, and his intention was to become, with his wife, promising Participate in rare languages. The wall ended with enjoying a different path and fully embraced coding. But his deep ideas on how languages work never left.

It seemed that the perspective of Wall was that the obsession with linguistic purity was exaggerated. The English language has words from French, Greek, German and even Akdian, and it betrays its winding history and its multiple origins. We divided our Infinitives and put our rates. We have a pun, whether intended and not. So what is a little strange when it comes to how to write an IF statement? The wall looked at the development as part of the language development process. There is an organic process that occurs here, and the final products should not be organized. Thus, the vast non -ruling – is not intended to build a vital language, whether it is a language designed to write text programs or Sonata.

Perl has “more than one way” to do things and the English language that has its many patterns and flexible nature, a nature that can contain everything from the cooking recipes to Heikos, shopping lists to Volkner. This is a sign of something really open. like He said the wall once: “I am strongly believed that the language … must be an immoral artistic means.” If Perl has any comprehensive vision or belief, this is just a fact that, perhaps there should be no programming doctrine at all.

To be clear, I was not a deep user for Perl. The construction of the sentence and chaos covered its strength for me, and when I got to know the structure that was well organized BethonI ran to that language and never looked back. This may actually be a hint of the cause of luster luster. Even in 1998, during its peak, there were suggestions that Pearl might lead to the desire to jump into something “cleaner”. Whatever the reason, Pearl is no longer common as before.