h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have been using Perl for about 2 years now. I think it is one of the marvels of the computing world. It is so useful for so many things - especially for building bridges between disparate applications. Development time is very quick (I have just started learning Java and boy! that requires twice the coding that Perl does), and performance is quite respectable (the estimate I have seen is that a Perl programs runs pi times slower than a functionally equivalent C program).

But perhaps the biggest benefit of using perl is that you can take advantage of all those marvellous add-on modules that so many people have written and given to posterity free, gratis and for nothing.

This speaks of a special community out there in the ethers.

I agree on the learning point. I was designing an Intranet and was learning java and perl at the same time and I got the basics of Perl in a couple of hours and Java took a lot longer. I especially like the short programming time.

I'm a big fan of the o'reilly site for perl and in the old days the Activeperl site, both of which were invaluable.

Anyway, I ought to do some more work on this entry soon . Have you got any suggestions for things I've missed so far?

Suggestions?

Well... I really do believe that the willingness of people to not only write useful modules but to place them in the public domain (usually via CPAN) is not only heart warming but worth a mention. It speaks of a benevolent kind of spirit.

Then there's the whole philosophical thing about Perl. The way that Larry Wall aimed it at the gap between C and shell scripts (Wall talks about this in terms of "whipuptitude" and "manipulexity").

In think you should mention Wall and the story of how and why he devised Perl in the first place, and that he's trained as a linguist. That explains a good deal about why Perl is the way it is.

Oh yeah... and another part of the Wall's philosophy - the three virtues of laziness, impatience and hubris

I would it very hard to explain Perl without mentioning Larry Wall.