It was twenty years ago today

Happy birthday, Perl!

It was 20 years ago today
Larry Wall taught some text to play
It's been going in & out of style
But it's stuck around for quite a while()
So may I introduce to you
The tool you've loved for all these years
Larry's Practical Extract & Report Laaaanguage

Perl 5.10 has been released today, as has Parrot 0.5.1. Perl 5.10 is a huge update, and you should look at it.

Michael Schwern points to baby pictures of our favorite language. He got Perl 1 working under modern compilers a few years back, and points to the current project and repository, now maintained by Richard Clamp.

Festivities around the Perl community abound. Perl Mongers in Chicago and Portland are getting together for dinner (and probably a little beer).

The plan was to have Perl 5.10 out today as part of the birthday celebration, but some last minute regex bugs seem to have put a wrench in that. Here's hoping it comes out soon.

It's Larry's Practical Extract Report Lang
5.10 got its bugs fixed
Larry's Practical Extract Report Lang
Don't ask for a date for version 6...

How are you celebrating? Post your links & stories here.

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4 Comments

Searle said:
Jay, congrats!

I just heard on BBC World: Fortran's celebrating too: it's the 50th birthday.

Looking at perl-1:
./Wishlist contains "case statement"
That took a quite a while :-)

Joe said:

Celebrated the birthday by doing Perl. What better way to celebrate? Well, my wife sarcastically asked, "Should I get you a present?" but I didn't think she really meant it.

I'm teaching an immersion-style Perl class for some people at work and Tuesday is our class day, so we celebrated by talking about subroutines, modules and references.

In the evening I built Perl 5.10 with an eye toward creating a standard build for all our systems. We don't have one yet, and it's time.

It was a great day to be a Perl geek.

furrycatherder Author Profile Page said:
Congrats, Larry. When Perl turns 21, you tell it to get a job and move out of the house.

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Andy Lester published on December 18, 2007 9:18 AM.

Tomorrow's a big day! was the previous entry in this blog.

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