The Timeline of Perl and its Culture
v3.0_0505
[ 1960s ] [ 1970s ] [ 1980s ] [ 1990s ] [ 2000s ] [ Other URLs of Interest ][ Sources ]
This document lives at http://history.perl.org/. If you
see any errors, omissions, have comments or would like to contribute a
tidbit for this ongoing mission, email
perlhist@history.perl.org.
Copyright
It's the Magic that counts.
-- Larry Wall on Perl's apparent ugliness
1960
Ted Nelson invents hypertext, known as the
Project Xanadu.
(Fast forward to 1999.)
1964
The concept of pipes connecting processes is suggested by Doug McIlroy at Bell Labs.
See http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/mdmpipe.html.
In Perl the same concept is seen in the default variable $_.
1968
Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc. (BBN) awarded Packet Switch contract to build Interface Message Processors (IMPs). [HIT]
US Senator Edward Kennedy sends a congratulatory telegram to BBN
for its million-dollar ARPA contract to build the "Interfaith" Message
Processor, and thanking them for their ecumenical efforts.
[HIT]
Douglas Engelbart invents the mouse while working at Xerox PARC.
1969
Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50
feet to pay another nickel.
But hey! You only feel 5 cents poorer each time.
-- Larry Wall in 1992Aug13.192357.15731@netlabs.com
UNIX is born at
Bell Labs. It was not until well into 1970 that Brian Kernighan
suggested the name `Unix,' in a somewhat treacherous pun on `Multics,'
the operating system we know today was born.
First Request for Comment (RFC):
"Host
Software" by Steve Crocker (7 April) [HIT]
1972
Ray Tomlinson (BBN) modifies email program for ARPANET where it becomes a quick hit. The @ sign was chosen from the punctuation keys on Tomlinson's Model 33 Teletype for its "at" meaning. (March) [HIT]
The programming language C is born at the Bell Labs.
(The Development of The C Language) by Dennis M. Ritchie).
C is one of Perl's ancestors, learn for example how the && and ++ operators were born. Perl is also implemented using C.
1973
grep is introduced by Ken Thompson as a ingenious componentization: the builtin regular expressions and commands of the ed
(the standard editor) are separated into an external utility: Global REgular expression Print. [EHU]
1975
Atari
introduces the first home video games. Who could forget Pong, Space
Invaders or Missile Command?
1976
Steven Jobs and Steven Wozniak found Apple Computer. (1 April)
1977
The computer language awk is designed by Alfred V. Aho, Peter J. Weinberger, and Brian W. Kernighan. awk is one
of Perl's ancestors.
1978
BTL (Bell Telephone Labs) releases UNIX V7 which diverges into the commercial (System V) and academic (BSD, Berkeley Software Distribution)
branches.
A shell by Stephen Bourne, simply known as the 'sh', is released. sh is one Perl's ancestors.
1979
On April 12, Kevin MacKenzie emails the MsgGroup a suggestion of
adding some emotion back into the dry text medium of email, such as
:-) for indicating a sentence was tongue-in-cheek. Though flamed by
many at the time, emoticons
became widely used. [HIT]
USENET established using UUCP between Duke and UNC by Tom Truscott,
Jim Ellis, and Steve Bellovin. All original groups were under net.*
hierarchy.
1981
Eric Allman develops
Sendmail which will become the
most widely used MTA on the internet.
RFC 801: NCTP/TCP
Transition Plan which will increase the number of possible hosts
from 256 to over one billion.
1982
DCA and ARPA establish the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and
Internet Protocol (IP), as the protocol suite, commonly known as
TCP/IP, for ARPANET.
Sun Microsystems is incorporated with 4 employees.
1983
Desktop workstations come into being, many with Berkeley UNIX (4.2
BSD) which includes IP networking software.
1984
The GNU Project is started to
develop a free UNIX-like operating system.
The Gnu Manifesto,
written by
Richard Stallman,
sets the stage for the coming
OpenSource revolution.
During the third quarter of the Super Bowl, Apple airs the famous
Ridley Scott
commercial depicting an Orwellian IBM World saved by the Macintosh. The Macintosh featured a zippy 8MHz 68000 Motorola chip, a 9" black and white built-in monitor, 128k of RAM and sold for $2,495. (22 January)
Domain Name System (DNS),
originally called JEEVES and later BIND, is developed by Paul
Mockapetris, later to be maintained by Paul Vixie.
The first
version of the X Window System is developed jointly by MIT Project
Athena and Digital Equipment Corporation. (19 June)
NFS is first introduced.
1985
Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL)
started.
awk gets a facelift (introducing user-defined functions, multiple input streams, and computed regular expressions),
the new version is called nawk. [GNU awk manual]
RFC 968: 'Twas
the Night Before Start-up. [HIT]
Larry Wall creates
rn. The RN news
reader was developed to minimize the amount of time the user was kept
waiting for news articles to be displayed. It did this by using cache
techniques. RN was also developed to minimize the use of computer
resources when running on computers with limited memory capabilities
at the sacrifice of some speed. Its maintainence was passed to Stan
Barber in 1987 when Perl took more of Larrys time.
O'Reilly and Associates moves from technical writing to book publishing;
the first `Nutshell' books.
1986
Network News Transfer Protocol
(NNTP) designed to
enhance Usenet news performance over TCP/IP.
Microsoft infec^H^H^H
troduces Windows to the world. (March)
1987
UUNET is founded with Usenix funds
to provide commercial UUCP and Usenet access. Originally an experiment
by Rick Adams and Mike O'Dell
Hmm, doubtful. The source code generally wasn't there
when I needed it.
-- Larry Wall when asked if he learned Perl from the perl source
Perl 1.000isunleashed upon
the world. Some People take Perls' Birthday seriously.
Behold as Randal sings
Happy Birthday to Larrys' answering machine. The description from the original man
page sums up this new language well. (18 December)
NAME
perl | Practical Extraction and Report Language
SYNOPSIS
perl [options] filename args
DESCRIPTION
Perl is a interpreted language optimized for scanning arbi-
trary text files, extracting information from those text
files, and printing reports based on that information. It's
also a good language for many system management tasks. The
language is intended to be practical (easy to use, effi-
cient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant,
minimal). It combines (in the author's opinion, anyway)
some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people
familiar with those languages should have little difficulty
with it. (Language historians will also note some vestiges
of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC|PLUS.) Expression syntax
corresponds quite closely to C expression syntax. If you
have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh,
but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little fas-
ter, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C, then
perl may be for you. There are also translators to turn
your sed and awk scripts into perl scripts. OK, enough
hype.
1988
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) developed by Jarkko Oikarinen. Later #perl (read as pound
perl) would appear on EFNet,
forming an essential part of Perl Culture. (January)
In the MIT X Conference the Xlib reference drafts by O'Reilly and
Associates raise
considerable
interest and ORA really gets started in publishing business.
(January)
I won't mention any names, because I don't want to get sun4's into trouble... :-)
-- Larry Wall in 11333@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV
Sun releases the SPARCstation 1.
Tcl tends to get ported to weird places like routers.
-- Larry Wall in 199710071721.KAA19014@wall.org
John Ousterhout writes Tcl or "Tool Command Language".
Perl 2.000
released. (5 June) Some of the enhancements from Perl1 included:
●New regexp routines derived from Henry Spencer's.
●Support for /(foo|bar)/
.
●Support for /(foo)*/
and /(fo
o)+/
.
●\s
for whitespace, \S for non
-
,
\d
for digit, \D
nondigit
●Local variables in blocks, subroutines and evals.
●Recursive subroutine calls are now supported.
●Array values may now be interpolated into lists:
unlink 'f
oo', 'bar', @trashcan, 'tmp';
●File globbing.
●Use of <>
in array contexts
returns the whole file or glob list.
●New iterator for normal arrays, foreach
,
that allows both read and write.
●Ability to open pipe to a forked off script for secure pipes
in setuid scripts.
●File inclusion via do 'foo.pl
';
●More file tests, including -t
to see if,
for instance, std
in
is a terminal.
File tests now behave in a more correct manner.
You can do file tests on filehandles as well as filenames.
The special filetests -T
and -B
test a file to see if it's text or binary.
●An eof can now be used on each file of the <> input
for such purposes as resetting the line numbers or appending
to each file of an inplace edit.
●Assignments can now function as lvalues, so you can say things like
($HOST = $host) =~
tr/a-z/A-Z/; ($obj = $src) =~
s/\.c$/.o/;
●You can now do certain file operations with a variable which holds
the name of a filehandle, e.g.
open(++$incl,$incl
udefilename); $foo = <$incl>;
●Warnings are now available (with -w) on use of uninitialized
variables and on identifiers that are mentioned only once,
and on reference to various undefined things.
●There is now a wait
operator.
●There is now a sort
operator.
●The manual is now not lying when it says that perl is generally
faster than sed. I hope.
Randal can write one-liners again. Everyone is happy, and peace spreads
over the whole Earth.
-- Larry Wall in <199705101952.MAA00756@wall.org>
Randal Schwartz creates the legendary Just Another Perl
Hacker .sig. Below is a post from
comp.lan
g.perl.misc
where he explains how it was created.
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl.misc
Subject: Re: Who is Just another Perl hacker?
From: merlyn@stonehenge.com (Randal L. Schwartz)
Message-ID: <M1HFPVH2JQ.FSF@HALFDOME.HOLDIT.COM>
>>>>> "Juho" == Juho Cederstrom writes:
Juho> But when do I become Just another Perl hacker? Who are they? I've read
Juho> the FAQ, but it doesn't answer my question. If I replace my email
Juho> signature with JAPH, do I break some kind of law?
Juho> Or is Just another Perl Hacker a person who just hacks Perl?
Well, this ol' JAPH thing started back in 88-ish when I was posting to
a bunch of different newsgroups, and would sign each message somewhat
individualized above the "-- " cut. For a while, it was stuff like:
Randal L. "Some Clever Phrase Here" Schwartz
and I'd change the phrase to fit. I got bored with retyping my name
repeatedly, so I start using:
Just another <SUBJECT> hacker,
in each news group, changing <SUBJECT> as appropriate. When I started
posting to the Perl newsgroup frequently, I just repeatedly typed:
Just another Perl hacker,
and that got boring, so I stepped it up to Perl code:
print "Just another Perl hacker,"
but again, that lacked the ability to soak up my then-spare-time, so
I started making them a bit more clever, like:
print join " ", reverse split ' ', "hacker, Perl another Just"
and that started a trend of me constantly trying to outdo myself in
each posting. The one that decoded morse code was probably one of my
favorites, as was the "old macdonald" one that is now immortalized in
Jeffrey's "Mastering Regular Expressions" (from O'Reilly). A few
others got into the act... notably one Mr. Larry Wall who wrote code
to pick a random article of mine out of his news spool, run the code,
but print "Not " in front of it!
I have a little less spare time these days, so the JAPH signoffs have
been pretty plain <SIGH>. But I occasionally sneak something in that
relates to what I'm answering.
So, in answer to your question, feel free to declare yourself a JAPH,
but most of us around here agree that I'm JAPH # 0. :)
print "Just another Perl hacker,"
Robert Tappan Morris infects the net with the infamous
worm. (3 November)
Johan Vromans releases the first Perl Reference Card which would later prove
to be the earliest published incidence of the word Perl. Johan has created a very
nice timeline
of the Perl Reference.(December)
1989
Tom Christiansen presents the first public Perl tutorial at
the Baltimore Usenix.
Perl
3.000 is released and is distributed by Larry for the first time
under the terms of the
GNU Public License. A
few of the new features: (18 Oct)
●Perl can now handle binary data correctly and has functions to
pack
and unpack
binary structures into
arrays or lists. You can now do arbitrary ioctl
functions.
●You can now pass things to subroutines by reference.
●Debugger enhancements.
●An array or associative array may now appear in a local()
list.
●Array values may now be interpolated into strings.
●Subroutine names are now distinguished by prefixing with
&. You can call subroutines without using do
,
and without passing any argument list at all.
●You can use the new -u
switch to cause perl to dump
core so that you can run undump
and produce a binary
executable image. Alternately you can use the "dum
p"
operator after initializing any variables and such.
●You can now chop lists.
●Perl now uses /bin/csh
to do filename globbing,
if available. This means that filenames with spaces or other
strangenesses work right.
●New functions: mkdir
and rmdir
,
getppid
, getpgrp
and setpgrp
,
getpriority
and setpriority
,
ch
root
, ioctl
and fcntl
,
flock
, r
eadlink
, lstat
,
rindex
, pack
and unpack
,
read
, warn
, dbmopen
and
dbmclose
, dump
, reverse
,
def
ined
, undef
.
Steve Jobs introduces the NeXT to the academic community for a mere
$6,500. Its main strengths are built-in ethernet, a Mach OS and TeX.
1990
Python invented by Guido van Rossum
at CWI in Amsterdam.
Convex becomes the first major computer vendor to include Perl as part
of its standard operating system distribution.
I know it's weird, but it does make it easier to write poetry in perl. :-)
-- Larry Wall in 7865@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV
Larry writes the world's first Perl Poem inspired by Randals JAPH
signatures: (March)
print STDOUT q
Just another Perl Hacker,
unless $spring
April Fool's "Black Perl" forgery (p. 553 of the
Blue Camel).
(1 April)
BEFOREHAND: close door, each window & exit; wait until time.
open spellbook, study, read (scan, select, tell us);
write it, print the hex while each watches,
reverse its length, write again;
kill spiders, pop them, chop, split, kill them.
unlink arms, shift, wait & listen (listening, wait),
sort the flock (then, warn the "goats" & kill the "sheep");
kill them, dump qualms, shift moralities,
values aside, each one;
die sheep! die to reverse the system
you accept (reject, respect);
next step,
kill the next sacrifice, each sacrifice,
wait, redo ritual until "all the spirits are pleased";
do it ("as they say").
do it(*everyone***must***participate***in***forbidden**s*e*x*).
return last victim; package body;
exit crypt (time, times & "half a time") & close it,
select (quickly) & warn your next vicitm;
AFTERWORDS: tell nobody.
wait, wait until time;
wait until next year, next decade;
sleep, sleep, die yourself,
die at last
# Larry Wall
# lwall@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is founded by Mitch Kapor.
Tom Christiansen's "The Answer to All Man's Problems" (about the Unix manpage system) is the first
paper published at an academic conference to spotlight Perl.
1991
It won't be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all... :-)
-- Larry Wall in 10160@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV
The first edition of Programming Perl, a.k.a. The Pink Camel, by Larry Wall and Randal Schwartz is published by O'Reilly and Associates. (January)
I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at
some Perl 4 code, and said, "What is that, swearing?"
-- Larry Wall in <199806181642.JAA10629@wall.org>
Perl 4.000 is released and includes an artistic license as well as the GPL. (21 March)
Linus Torvalds releases the first version of Linux. Linus had wanted to name it Freax (free + freak + unix) but the site administrator liked Linux better. It was distributed under the GNU Public License. (July)
Sun unveils Solaris 2 for the SPARC, a System V variant.
1992
The first release of MacPerl, 4.0.2. (January)
Rick Gates begins The Internet
Hunt, a scavenger hunt for information to answer trivia questions
using only the Internet. It dies in October 1994 when Gates decides to
rework the hunt for the WWW, but never gets around to
it. (September)
Sharon Hopkins presents "Camels and Needles: Computer Poetry Meets the Perl Programming Language" at the USENIX Winter Technical Conference. Sharon is the reigning Perl Poetry Pumpqueen and takes advantage of Perl's vocabulary which is very forgiving when abused. (December)
MacPerl 4.0.5 is released with Socket and DBM support. (December)
1993
MacPerl mailing list is created. (January)
Godwin's
Law starts being used on Usenet, etc. It is sometimes seen even in
comp.lang.perl.misc
. (February)
The final Perl4 release, 4.036.
Larry Wall is awarded
the Dr. Dobbs Journal Excellence in Programming Award. (March)
MacPerl 4.1.0 features a "True Macintosh Human Interface." (October)
Oh, wait, that was Randal...nevermind...
-- Larry Wall in 199709261754.KAA23761@wall.org
Randal Schwartz is
questioned
by police for running crack
on the password database at
Intel. They returned the next day with a search warrant.
(1 November)
Learning Perl, a.k.a. the Llama book, by Randal Schwartz is first published by O'Reilly. (November)
The Perl-packrats mailing list is started with the initial participants being Bill Middleton, Tom Christiansen, Henk Penning, Jarkko Hietaniemi, Stephen Potter, Lee Mcloughlin, and Mark of coombs. (2 December)
FreeBSD 1.0 is released and distributed via Walnut Creek CDROM. (December)
The first
ideas
of what will become CPAN emerge on the Perl-packrats mailing
list. Modeled after the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN) it
would be an archive of all things Perl. (9 December)
1994
The whole intent of Perl 5's module system was to encourage the
growth of Perl culture rather than the Perl core.
-- Larry Wall in 199705101952.MAA00756@wall.org
The much anticipated Perl 5.000 is unveiled. It was a complete
rewrite of Perl. A few of the features and pitfalls are: (18
October)
●Objects.
●The documentation is much more extensive and perldoc
along with pod
is introduced.
●Lexical scoping available via my
.
eval
can see the current lexical variables.
●The preferred package delimiter is now ::
rather than '
.
●New functions include:
abs()
, c
hr()
, uc()
,
ucfirst()
, lc()
, lc
first()
,
chomp()
, glob()
●There is now an English
module that provides
human readable translations for cryptic variable names.
●Several previously added features have been subsumed under
the new keywords use
and no
.
●Pattern matches may now be followed by an m
ors
modifier to explicitly request multiline
or singleline semantics. An s
modifier makes
. match
newline.
●@
now always interpolates an array in
double-quotish strings. Some programs may now need to use backslash
to protect any @
that shouldn't interpolate.
●It is no longer syntactically legal to use whitespace as the name
of a variable, or as a delimiter for any kind of quote construct.
●The -w
switch is much more informative.
●=>
is now a synonym for comma. This is useful as
documentation for arguments that come in pairs, such as
initializers for associative arrays, or named arguments to
a subroutine.
The Perl5-Porters Mailing List is conceived. (May-ish)
Andreas König recalls..."During the last days of April
1994 an email thread started with a quickly growing CC list. After
maybe 100 mails Jarkko had the insane idea to put all recipients on
a mailing list. That must have been in May."
Tim Bunce introduces DBI/DBD::Oracle. (October)
Larry presents
The Taming
of the Camel at The USENIX Symposium on Very High Level Languages
(VHLLs), held in Santa Fe New Mexico discussing Perl5. (26-28
October)
MacPerl 4.1.4 supports the PPC architecture. (December)
1995
Rasmus Lerdorf created a Perl CGI script which inserted a tag into
the HTML code of his page, and collected the information on the
visitors. He called the logging code PHP-Tools
for "Personal Home Page", because for him, the use was for his personal home page.
A few inquires came in asking how they could get the tools, and Lerdorf decided to give
it away. [Thanks Neil Kandalgaonkar]
Jarkko prods
the Perl-packrats list to try and reincarnate the CPAN idea which has
been dormant for over a year. One rather visionary idea that has yet
to be implemented, but is mentioned, is a nice web-based search
engine. (12 February)
Perl 5.001 is released. (13 March)
The "Schwartzian Transform" is born out of a newbie question about sort and Randal
answers with a 5-line expert answer. Tom Christiansen names this bit of magic later in
the year. (8 April)
Andreas König suggests to the Perl-packrats that there be a single
MASTER site for Perl. (18 April)
First official public release (0.6.2) of the Apache web server. (April)
comp.lang.perl
is split into
comp.lang.perl.misc
and
c
omp.lang.perl.announce
. (May)
Sun launches Java. (23 May)
Learning PerlbyRandal Schwartz is now available in Japanese. (June)
Perl merits coverage by The Economist with the advent of
Perl5.﹃Unlike lots of other freely available software, Perl is
useful, and it works.﹄(1 July)
Names for the future CPAN are tossed around. Neil Bowers proposes
"EYEKAP - Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Perl". Jarkko
favours "REEPH" since that is where one finds Pearls. Tim Bunce
suggests "ARK - Archive of Reusable Knowledge". (#perl had a few
interesting ideas upon hearing about these. PARK - Perl Archive of
Reusable Knowledge and CRAP - Central Repository for All things
Perl). (June)
The CPAN "private showing" is announced to P5P and the
Perl-packrats by Jarkko to kick the tires on the proposed "Mother of
all Perl Archives". At this point there are no plans for 'Perl5
extensions'. There is close to a whopping 390MB of Perl stuff
including; source code for Perl, scripts, documentation, Perl for
non-UNIX platforms, etc. (1 August)
Andreas König begins his own module repository at franz.ww.tu-berlin.de. (15 August)
MacPerl 5.0.0 released. (August)
Randal becomes Just Another Convicted Perl Hacker. (11 September)
Tom Christiansen announces the new Perl home page at http://mox.perl.com. (4 September)
(I thought this was very late for Perl to be getting a home page of its own until I saw the numbers below from Hobbes' Internet Timeline which really indicates that Perl was well ahead of the curve.)
Tom Christiansen posts version 0.1 of "PDSC: The Perl Data Structures Cookbook". Look Familiar? (2 October)
Tim Bunce posts the first module list that lists CPAN as the central module repository. (25 September)
Matt Wright puts
"Matt's Script
Archive" online and will continue to distribute nasty Perl code to
the clueless and the unininformed through the end of the 20th
Century. Some of the more memorable 'scripts' are the infamous
Guestbook, formmail and WWWBoard. (October)
comp.lang.perl.tk
isannounced. (20 October)
CPAN is officially
introduced to the Perl
community at large by Jarkko Hietaniemi, the Self-Appointed Master
Librarian of CPAN. (26 October)
Tom Christiansen releases the Mail::Auto_FAQ Module. (14 November)
1996
Jon Orwant posts the RFD for comp.lang.perl.modules
due to the high traffic in comp.lang.perl.misc
. (16 January)
The Free Software Foundation hosts the First Conference on Freely Redistributable Software. (2-5 February)
The Perl Journal is first advertised oncomp.lang.perl.
announce
. Issue #1 would be published a month later, beginning a very important publication in the world of Perl. Jon Orwant produced the Journal on a NeXT and a shoestring. Jon was kind enough to share his story and some interesting figures regarding the development of TPJ: (21 February)
In 1995, TPJ began with 400 subscribers, and I produced everything out
of my apartment with my trusty NeXT. My application to produce credit
cards was held up for six weeks because I lived on Pearl Street in
Cambridge and the bankers were convinced that I couldn't possibly
want to accept credit cards as the "Perl" Journal.
The first issue was Spring 1996 and was 32 pages. Issues #13 and #14
are 80 pages on colored glossy paper. Now TPJ has about 13000
readers: 9000 paid mail, and 4000 bookstore. I've had a pretty steady
300-400 new subscribers per month since the first Perl conference.
O'Reilly helped me a *lot* by putting subscription cards in their Perl
books. I can count the number of explicit cancellations of TPJ on
two hands.
All issues are still being printed and reprinted due to the demand
for back issues -- this is *not* how typical magazines operate.
Most magazines operate on ad sales, but since Perl doesn't lend
itself to many commercial products, I had to produce Quality Content
to make ends meet.
Up until March 1999, I did pretty much everything myself: editing,
proofreading, layout, design, ad sales, printing, production, mailing,
accounting, you name it. Eventually TPJ grew to be way too much for
me, and a company called EarthWeb took over production.
Total print run Cover Art Pages
Issue #1: 5000 Fuzzy Camel 32
Issue #2: 4000 Crystal Clam 39
Issue #3: 7500 Greenbar 41
Issue #4: 7000 Etch-a-sketch 41
Issue #5: 9000 Lego Guys 40
Issue #6: 10000 Scrabble 48
Issue #7: 10000 Microsoft Spider 48
Issue #8: 12000 Java Butts 56
Issue #9: 15000 Drummer/Coder 64
Issue #10: 18000 Underwood 66
Issue #11: 16000 X-Files 62
Issue #12: 18000 Atari 72
Issue #13: 18000 Walkman 78
Total distrib through news agents
Issue #1: 0
Issue #2: 1600
Issue #3: 1800
Issue #4: 2000
Issue #5: 2050
Issue #6: 2000
Issue #7: 2160
Issue #8: 3060
Issue #9: 3075
Issue #10: c. 3300
Issue #11: c. 3600
Issue #12: c. 3900
Issue #13: c. 4200
Issue #14: 4425
TPJ subscribers by state:
CA 1696
NY 569
MA 525
TX 503
WA 332
IL 309
MD 305
NJ 295
VA 278
CO 263
PA 263
OH 188
FL 181
OR 172
NC 167
MN 164
MI 157
GA 147
AZ 123
WI 104
CT 102
IN 95
MO 87
NH 71
UT 53
TN 52
AL 48
KS 47
NM 44
NE 42
IA 39
KY 33
DC 27
OK 26
LA 25
SC 24
NV 23
ID 23
AK 23
RI 23
ME 21
MS 21
AE 18
AR 18
VT 16
MT 15
HI 14
DE 13
WV 11
AP 8
US 8
ND 6
SD 5
WY 1
AA 1
NB 1
PR 1
VW 1
TY 1
TPJ subscribers by country:
Country Number % overall % int'l
usa 6730 73.50 0.00
unitedkingdom 453 4.95 18.67
germany 371 4.05 15.29
canada 308 3.36 12.69
australia 161 1.76 6.63
sweden 104 1.14 4.29
switzerland 100 1.09 4.12
france 97 1.06 4.00
netherlands 96 1.05 3.96
japan 82 0.90 3.38
finland 62 0.68 2.55
denmark 60 0.66 2.47
norway 55 0.60 2.27
italy 48 0.52 1.98
belgium 46 0.50 1.90
austria 40 0.44 1.65
brazil 32 0.35 1.32
israel 31 0.34 1.28
newzealand 30 0.33 1.24
spain 26 0.28 1.07
hongkong 24 0.26 0.99
ireland 23 0.25 0.95
taiwan 16 0.17 0.66
singapore 16 0.17 0.66
portugal 13 0.14 0.54
argentina 12 0.13 0.49
greece 10 0.11 0.41
mexico 9 0.10 0.37
scotland 7 0.08 0.29
chile 7 0.08 0.29
slovenia 6 0.07 0.25
poland 6 0.07 0.25
southafrica 6 0.07 0.25
india 5 0.05 0.21
luxembourg 5 0.05 0.21
newzealand 30 0.33 1.24
spain 26 0.28 1.07
hongkong 24 0.26 0.99
ireland 23 0.25 0.95
taiwan 16 0.17 0.66
singapore 16 0.17 0.66
portugal 13 0.14 0.54
argentina 12 0.13 0.49
greece 10 0.11 0.41
mexico 9 0.10 0.37
scotland 7 0.08 0.29
chile 7 0.08 0.29
slovenia 6 0.07 0.25
poland 6 0.07 0.25
southafrica 6 0.07 0.25
india 5 0.05 0.21
luxembourg 5 0.05 0.21
iceland 4 0.04 0.16
czechrepublic 4 0.04 0.16
southkorea 3 0.03 0.12
saudiarabia 3 0.03 0.12
thailand 3 0.03 0.12
china 3 0.03 0.12
korea 3 0.03 0.12
pakistan 2 0.02 0.08
hungary 2 0.02 0.08
bermuda 2 0.02 0.08
russia 2 0.02 0.08
malaysia 2 0.02 0.08
unitedarabemirates 2 0.02 0.08
unitedstates 2 0.02 0.08
ukraine 2 0.02 0.08
unitedkingdon 1 0.01 0.04
germnay 1 0.01 0.04
swizterland 1 0.01 0.04
romania 1 0.01 0.04
indonesia 1 0.01 0.04
englanduk 1 0.01 0.04
qatar 1 0.01 0.04
andrededeurwaerder 1 0.01 0.04
malta 1 0.01 0.04
republicofchina 1 0.01 0.04
phillipines 1 0.01 0.04
nigeria 1 0.01 0.04
venezuela 1 0.01 0.04
lebanon 1 0.01 0.04
uruguay 1 0.01 0.04
belarus 1 0.01 0.04
luxembourgeurope 1 0.01 0.04
frenchpolynesia 1 0.01 0.04
egypt 1 0.01 0.04
turkey 1 0.01 0.04
ecuador 1 0.01 0.04
[note: these figures current as of 6/99]
The vote results
for comp.l
ang.perl.modules
is almost unanimous and passes
485/17. (27 February)
Perl 5.002
announced which
introduced, among other things, subroutine prototypes and
sysopen()
. (29 February)
The CPAN multiplex dispatcher (a.k.a. the Multiplexor) is introduced on perl.com to redirect CPAN requests to a mirror closer and probably faster than perl.com. (9 March)
The Zeroth Annual Obfuscated Perl Contest is
inflicted upon many
Perl programmers and causes much sleep deprivation. It is touted as "a
socially acceptable creative outlet". The
winners and their entries are on-line. (22 April)
Malcolm Beattie announces the alpha1 release of the Perl Compiler Kit. (13 May)
CERT Advisory CA-96-12
"Vulnerability in
suidperl" issued reporting a vulnerability in systems that contain
the suidperl program and that support saved set-user-ID and saved
set-group-ID. By exploiting this vulnerability, anyone with access to
an account on such a system may gain root access.
The recommended workaround is to install Perl 5.003 (26 June)
Apache is the most popular web server software on the internet.
The Second Edition of Programming
Perl, a.k.a. the blue Camel, by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen
and Randal Schwartz is published by O'Reilly. (September)
InIssue #4 of The Perl Journal, Charlie Stross wrote a Lovecraftian Homage
to the revered tome and was possibly inspired by Tom Christiansen's Chthonic
Nightmare.
Finally, a month ago, I discovered the true fount of insight into
the nature of the beast. A book is available, to those who know who
and what to ask for. Kept in the deepest dungeon of a library's
stacks, its cover sealed with bronze clasps and its spine earthed by a
silver chain, the book of the camel contains all the forbidden
knowledge any evil necromancer could desire. There, laid out for my
delectation was all the truth that my bleeding forehead could
contain. Bleeding, for upon reading the book I was driven to pound my
head upon the stone cobblestones of the oubliette to which the
librarian had driven me. For I now realize that I have no hope of
salvation; that my soul is eternally doomed to torment, and that the
evil that gibbers and howls in the void beyond space will have me in
the end. For I discovered secret clauses buried in the text of the
book; and there was much howling and grinding of teeth as I realised
what my earlier incantations had achieved. The camel has a mind of its
own, a subtle and demented psychosis as old as time and twice as huge:
it is eating my brain with a tea-spoon, and I feel quite sick. I have
become the vector for a plague out of space-time, a language with
embedded magic and probabilistic parsers, a language that is eating my
soul! Even the scholars of the local university would be hard-pressed
to conduct a successful exorcism. For I have been polluted; the
nemesis of orthogonality, the beast of UNIX, has laid its claws in my
heart.
I cannot control myself any more. Soon I shall be entirely its
creature, and then I shall be forced to write down the forbidden
knowledge I have received -- to write it down and publish it in an
innocucous-looking volume, presented to the general reader so they
might suffer and wilt in its hideous grasp.
But first I warn you! Flee while you can! Flee before the
approach of the dread beast with one hump and no 'a' in its name, flee
before it eats your mind as it has
Oh, that's better. I feel all right now. Don't worry,
everything is under control.
There is no cause for alarm.
I repeat: there is no cause for alarm.
(It is unknown whether the librarian of the above story
refers to the Librarian of CPAN.)
The Perl Institute (TPI) is
announced to the
public. (4 November)
Doug MacEachern introduces mod_perl,
which embeds a perl interpreter into an Apache module.
Larry Wall joins the staff of O'Reilly & Associates as a Senior Software Developer.
PerlScript released in beta from ActiveState Tool Corporation. (4 December)
1997
TPI announces a web-accessible mirror of CPAN. (9 January)
Kevin Lenzo sires purl, a
sibling of url which was created in 1995, who is an infobot residing
on #perl and is somewhat like the collective
consciousness of the Perl community. Sometimes people think they
are really interacting with a real person when purl is around and she
is quite useful in pointing the clueless at the proper resources. /me
tosses purl a yummy botsnack.
WebReview prints "The
Rebels of Perl", an interview with Larry and Tom. (28
February)
Learning Perl, Second Edition, a.k.a the Llama book, by Randal Schwartz and Tom Christiansen is published by O'Reilly. (July)
Perl 6 is announced...well, kinda. April in July? (21 July)
O'Reilly announces their partnership with ActiveState which will assist in producing the Win32 Perl Resource Kit and Oneperl. (28 July)
Gurusamy Sarathy remembers how it all was....
"ORA were the catalyst in bringing ActiveState together with the Win32
people from perl5-porters. Both groups were working on different
aspects of win32 support at the time. TPC1 was the venue where we had a
breakfast meeting that set the course for what happened to bring the two
ports together.
First some background on the two ports. The port that was being
developed by perl5-porters started by adapting what was there in the
5.001m-based port by HIP Communications, which was funded by Microsoft,
and was actually distributed in the Windows NT Resource Kit. Beginning
with 5.003_24, serious effort went into making this highly compatible
with what was available on Unix, and 5.004 did have very complete win32
support.
By that time, HIP Communications had been sold, and Activeware Internet
Corp. headed by Dick Hardt was continuing the work that was started by
HIP, which was also founded by Dick. (I'm paraphrasing from hearsay
history here...) Activeware had made extensive source code changes to
support evolving Win32 technologies, and their code base had diverged
somewhat from 5.003_07. So the Activeware port had excellent support
for Win32 functionality but was based on an older perl than was available
at the time.
After the breakfast meeting, ORA arranged (and financed) biweekly
teleconferences to help focus on the tasks that needed to be
accomplished for the 5.005 release. The win32 merge was only one of
several tasks that needed to be done for 5.005. Malcolm Beattie had
already done considerable work on the Compiler and on the threading
support; his major task was to merge his prior work into the evolving
5.005 code base. In conjunction with that, Nick Ing-Simmons and I
worked to extend the existing win32 support in the core to support both
the Compiler and threading. ActiveState (primarily Dick Hardt and Doug
Lankshear) worked in parallel with that evolution to merge their C++
based core code into Perl, which later became known as the "PERL_OBJECT
support".
Around the time 5.004_66 was released, Malcolm had to divert his
attention to his family and couldn't carry on the role of "pumpking", so
I took on that responsibility. (See the calender in perlhist.pod.) We
only had five weeks to our deadline, and there was a bit of work to be
done. I don't remember sleeping much during that time. :-)"
The first O'Reilly Perl Conference
(TPC) is
held in San Jose, California. The conference was attended by 1047 Perl
programmers making it a success and ensuring a second
conference. Larry opened with his
"State of the
Onion" speech. Eric Raymond gave the now famous
"The Cathedral and The Bazaar" talk. One person was enthused
enough to write a
report of his experience. It even inspired a
parody.
SunWorld interviewed Larry Wall and Tim O'Reilly just before the conference where Tim
explains how TPC came about: (19-21 August)
O'Reilly: We had a meeting at our offices where we invited in a
bunch of people we knew who were concerned about the future of Perl
for a brainstorming summit. We had about 20 people. And we said 'boy,
it's really great to have all these people coming together to talk
about this, face to face.' And we said, 'hey, we really ought to do a
conference.'
Just a few weeks after we made that decision, Larry gave a
talk at Computer Literacy Bookshop, and one of the people in the
audience got up and said 'I was just at JavaOne. How come there isn't
a PerlOne?' It's funny because I think people are starting to
recognize there's a lot of people using Perl. Why isn't there this
visibility? That again is a lot of what we've really been focusing
on. Here's a language so widely used on the Internet, and because it
doesn't have a lot of money behind it -- there's nobody who cares
about it in the stock market -- it doesn't get a lot of press. And
it's sort of silly, so we said, 'Let's put on a conference. We need to
raise the profile of Perl.' And, sure enough, we're heading toward
1,000 people coming. And this is not a trade show kind of thing; this
is just conference and tutorials.
Advanced Perl
Programming, a.k.a. the Panther book, by Sriram Srinivasan is
published by O'Reilly. (August)
Programming
Perl on Win32 Systems, a.k.a. the Gecko book, by Randal
Schwartz, Erik Olson, and Tom Christiansen is published by
O'Reilly. (August)
Songline Studios now hosts
perl.com on a T3 upgrading from a 28.8K PPP connection. (August)
I want to see people using Perl to glue things together creatively, not just technically but also socially.
-- Larry Wall in 199702111730.JAA28598@wall.org
brian d foy
organises
the "Perl /M((o|u)ngers|aniacs)*/" in New York City. Unfortunately the
State of New York wouldn't accept a regex for a corporation name so it
became Perl Mongers. NY.pm was the
first group and has grown rapidly since. (October)
Matt Wright of the script archive fame publishes
CGI/Perl Cookbook. It
touts '7 scripts, 12 subroutines, each line of code explained', all in
a nice compact 650+ page book. Whatever dude. (note: visiting this
site crashed my mac) (October)
Effective Perl
Programming, a.k.a. the Shinyball book, written by Joseph
Hall is published by Addison-Wesley. (November)
The Perl Resource Kit -- UNIX Edition, a.k.a. the PRK or Boxed Camel, by Larry Wall, Nathan Patwardhan, Ellen Siever, David Futato and Brian Jepson is published by O'Reilly. (November)
Eric Allman and Greg Olson form Sendmail, Inc. to produce a
commercial version of sendmail and support.
1998
The movie Sphere is
released featuring a small snippet of code
from the Perl FAQ.
Netscape
announces
that it is going to release (some of) the source code to Netscape
Navigator, though not under the GPL. The source will hit the net on
the March 31st. (22 January)
The term "Open
Source" is coined in Palo Alto, Ca. There is a graph that
shows the number of times OpenSource is mentioned in the press from
February through July 1998. (February)
We realized it was time to dump the confrontational attitude
that has been associated with `free software' in the past and sell the
idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that
motivated Netscape. We brainstormed about tactics and a new
label. `Open source', contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best
thing we came up with.
Software in the Public
Interest (SPI) applies to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to
register the term OpenSource as a certification mark which is a
special kind of trademark. (24 February)
All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory... :-)
-- Larry Wall in 1991Jul13.010945.19157@netlabs.com
Salon Magazine
interviews
Eric Raymond in the wake of Netscapes announcement to release their
souce code and starts bringing the use of OpenSource to the general
reading public. Two priceless quotes from the article: (April)
A self-described neo-pagan libertarian who enjoys shooting
semi-automatic weapons, Raymond fits the classic stereotype of the
hacker almost too well. Hackers tend to think they know better; free
software libertarian hackers tend to think they know best of all. As
Raymond told me with pride: "I'm an arrogant son of a bitch."
I notice that you no longer prefer to use the term﹃free
software.﹄Instead, you say "open source." Can you explain?
Sure. [After meeting with Netscape] I got together with
a bunch of free software hackers and we had our own strategy
conference. The issue on the table was how to exploit the Netscape
breakthrough. We worked out some strategies and tactics. First
conclusion: The name "free software" has to go. The problem is nobody
knows what "free" means, and to the extent that they do think they
know, it's tied in with a whole bunch of ideology and that crazy guy
from Boston, Richard Stallman.
Randal Schwartz
releases the highly acclaimed sh2perl module. (1 April)
O'Reilly sponsors the first freeware
Summit.
comp.lang.perl.moderated
comes to Usenet after much
heated debate.
Larry discusses the
"Free-Software Concept"
with ZDNet in which he mentions that Perl could not have succeeded had it been proprietary.
MacPerl: Power and Ease,
by Chris Nandor and Vicki Brown is published by Prime Time Freeware. (May)
Perl5.005 is
announced. (22 July)
The Perl
Cookbook, a.k.a. the Ram book or PCB, by Tom Christiansen and
Nathan Torkington is published by O'Reilly. (August)
The Perl
Resource Kit -- Win32 Edition, a.k.a. the PRK or boxed gecko,
by Dick Hardt, Erik Olson, David Futato, and Brian Jepson is published
by O'Reilly. (August)
The Perl 5
Pocket Reference, 2nd Edition, by Johan
Vromans is published by O'Reilly. (August)
Sun Microsystems, makes Solaris
available
under a free license to individual users, also to
educational/non-profit/research institutions. They view it as a way to
'aggressively expand their developer base'. (10 August)
It's certainly easy to calculate the average attendance for Perl
conferences.
-- Larry Wall in 199710071721.KAA19014@wall.org
TPC2, the Second Annual Perl Conference was held in San Jose,
California at the Fairmont Hotel. Over 1200 Perl people attended with
facilities this year for internet access and tables in the
tutorials. Larry Wall gave his Second State
of the Onion Speech, Jon Orwant hosted a hilarious Quiz Show, and
Tim Bray talked about XML and Perl. Nathan Torkington and Kurt Starsinic took
pictures. Vicki Brown covered
the conference for Sunworld. (19-21 August)
Kurt Starsinic organises the return of scripts to CPAN. (September)
Larry Wall is
awarded
the first Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free
Software. (9 October).
CPAN gets its 100th mirror site at Harrisonburg, Virginia. Distribution
per continent: Africa 1, Asia 15, Australasia 6, Central America 1, Europe 52,
North America 21, South America 3. (Where's Antarctica? Penguins need Perl.)
Jon Postel dies and is remembered in RFC2468 titled
I
Remember IANA. It was a very sad day around BBN where I was
working at the time. (17 October)
I think one fallout from the Halloween debacle is that
Microsoft is rather more aware than they were of how much benefit
they're getting from open source software.
-- Larry Wall in 199901301945.LAA22023@wall.org
The Microsoft
"Halloween Documents",
internal corporate memos, are leaked to the public. Here are some
choice tidbits mentioning Perl:
Some very large projects discard the `benevolent dictator'
model entirely. One way to do this is turn the co-developers into a
voting committee (as with Apache). Another is rotating dictatorship,
in which control is occasionally passed from one member to another
within a circle of senior co-developers (the Perl developers organize
themselves this way).
An indirect example is O'Reilly & Associates employment of
Larry Wall -- "leader" and full time developer of PERL. The #1
publisher of PERL reference books, of course is O'Reilly &
Associates." (October)
The Perl/Tk
Pocket Reference, by Stephen Lidie, is published by
O'Reilly. (November)
Eric Raymond sends an open
letter to AOL after the announcement of the AOL/Sun/Netscape deal,
urging them to continue and encourage the Netscape open standard
browser. In the letter, Raymond states: (25 November)
Instead, by freeing the source Netscape created an open standard
browser that could survive even the worst case, predatory capture of
Netscape's own intellectual property. By enlisting the open-source
community, Netscape ensured that Mozilla would evolve and improve
faster than any proprietary competition. Mozilla's success would deny
Microsoft even the possibility of monopoly control over the Web; to
use Microsoft's own language in the Halloween Documents, it would
``commoditize'' the infrastructure.
Tim O'Reilly is featured in Esther Dyson's newsletter "Release 1.0"
with a 31 page essay titled
"The Open-Source
Revolution". OpenSource has come of age. In the essay Tim
estimates the Perl community has 1,000,000 members. (November)
PC Magazine Names Perl a Finalist
for the 1998 Technical Excellence Award in the Development Tool
category. Of course, an MS product won. (December)
Perl in a
Nutshell, a.k.a. the Nutty Camel, by Ellen Siever, Stephen
Spainhour, and Nathan Patwardhan is published by
O'Reilly. (December)
O'Reilly makes the Java/Perl Lingo (JPL)
available
as open source software. It was previously only available in the Perl
Resource Kit-UNIX Edition. The tool and source code are included with
Perl5.005_54. (6 December)
1999
ActiveState
announces PerlDirect.
(6 January)
PerlDirect provides reliability, stability and accountability
for Perl through the following features: validated, quality-assured
releases of Perl and its popular extensions; advice and support; Y2K
Test Suite; and a Perl Alert weekly bulletin. PerlDirect also offers
an exclusive opportunity to provide direct input in a leading
organization involved in Open Source development. Basic annual
subscription rates start at $12,000 USD.
Learning
Perl/Tk, a.k.a. the Emu book, by Nancy Walsh is published by
O'Reilly. (January)
New Riders publish
Windows NT Win32 Perl Programming: The Standard Extensions , by Dave Roth. (January)
OpenSources:
Voices from the Open Source Revolution is published by
O'Reilly. (January)
Programming Web
Graphics with Perl & Gnu Software, a.k.a. the Titi book,
by Shawn Wallace published by O'Reilly. (February)
O'Reilly
announces
Brian Behlendorf of the Apache Project is joining the ORA team to
further his work on Apache as well as other OpenSource projects.
MacPerl Module Porters open their own site
for module development and distribution. (2 February)
Feed Magazine
interviews
Larry as part of its OSS series where Larry discusses some of his
views onand why Perl came about. (9 February)
FEED: Let's say I am an alien anthropologist, studying computer
languages, and I came across Perl. What's going to grab me?
Wall: One of the things that's going to grab you as an
anthropologist is the fact that there really is an anthropological
story here. Most other computer languages are pretty sterile. They're
about technology. The difference with Perl is that I decided to create
the culture at the same time as I was creating the language. My
background is in both computers and linguistics... I put more ideas
from linguistics into Perl than is typical in computer science.
Red Herring Magazine features an
article
on freeware discussing the emerging OpenSource business model. Both
O'Reilly and ActiveState were quoted, with Tim O'Reilly stating:
(February)
The greatest opportunity for an open-source software business
model may come from even less direct plays -- companies that
specialize in essential accessories like manuals stand to gain
substantial profits from the demand for open-source software
materials. O'Reilly amp; Associates, the leading publisher of
technical resource books, has sold more than $94 million in
open-source-related materials since it was founded, most of that since
1997.
"Computer Programming. Hackers Rule" or so The Economist story
asserts as they cover the emerging Opensource revolution. (20
February)
Infoworld awards
Tim O'Reilly their 1998 Industry Achievement Award for his OpenSource evangelism.
(22 February)
The Perl power tools
project is launched by Tom Christiansen that﹃attempts to recreate
the basic shell command set in a portable and robust way for three
great reasons: Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris.﹄(25 February)
Tom Christiansen released
pmtools,
a suite of small programs to help manage modules. (February)
Writing
Apache Modules with Perl and C, a.k.a the Hawk book, by
Lincoln Stein and Doug MacEachern published by O'Reilly. (March)
Graham Barr releases Perl 5.005_03 which includes a number of bugfixes, dumpvar.pl,
and perlreftut, perlopentut, and perlthrtut. (March)
Larry delivers the "Perl,
the first postmodern computer language" talk at Linux World.
(3 March)
Perl Golf is coined
by Greg Bacon.
The Board of Directors of The Perl Institute unanimously
vote
to dissolve The Perl Institute. Jon Orwant also
talks
about TPI, why it failed and what the Perl community needs to fill the
gap. (3 March)
The
Second
Open Source and Community Licensing Summit is hosted by O'Reilly
and brings together all of the leaders of OSS companies to discuss the
state of the movement. (5 March)
Al Gore
reveals
that﹃During my service in the United States Congress, I took the
initiative in creating the internet.﹄(11 March)
Sun Microsystems decides to sponsor the Perl Mongers for $250,000
whereupon they will now be known as the Java Mongers.
(1 April)
USA Today features an article about the O'Reilly
animal
menagerie. (4 April)
Neal Stephenson writes an essay titled "In the Beginning was the
Command Line". An exerpt: (April)
In the world of open source software, bug reports are useful
information. Making them public is a service to other users, and
improves the OS. Making them public systematically is so
important that highly intelligent people voluntarily put time and
money into running bug databases. In the commercial OS world, however,
reporting a bug is a privilege that you have to pay lots of money
for. But if you pay for it, it follows that the bug report must be
kept confidential--otherwise anyone could get the benefit of
your ninety-five bucks! And yet nothing prevents NT users from setting
up their own public bug database.
This is, in other words, another feature of the OS market that
simply makes no sense unless you view it in the context of
culture. What Microsoft is selling through Pay Per Incident isn't
technical support so much as the continued illusion that its customers
are engaging in some kind of rational business transaction. It is a
sort of routine maintenance fee for the upkeep of the fantasy. If
people really wanted a solid OS they would use Linux, and if they
really wanted tech support they would find a way to get it;
Microsoft's customers want something else.
SourceXchange is
created by Brian Behlendorf and O'Reilly & Associates to provide
services and infrastructure for the development of OpenSource software
to benefit developers and users alike. (April)
Baiju Thakkar unveils the first issue of
Perlmonth Magazine. Perlmonth is a free, web-based publication featuring
articles by experienced Perl people. (May)
The Perl Mongers now boast ~180
groups all over the World. Perl Mongers generally meet once a month
over beer to talk about Perl and almost any other random topic. Monger
is described in the English dictionary as "a dealer in a specific
commodity". However, in Portuguese it has a different meaning. Brent
Michalski of stl.pm learned when he went to a conference in Lisbon
that International diplomacy takes on new meaning: (May)
Well, the online dictionaries don't cover the whole richness of
the Portuguese language.
Technically speaking, a retarded in Portuguese is called a『atrasado
mental』which means mental retard (pretty close to english).
There is another term for people who have the chromossome disorder
called the Down Syndrome (who show some mental retardness too), the
term is "Mongoloide".
This got abused (as always in most languages) and spawned the pretty
common way to insult someone which is to call him a "Monga", a slang term.
The way "Monga" reads in Portuguese is very very close to "monger" in
English, much closer than monk.
And well, I know the first looks I get when I tell someone I'm a Perl
Monger :-)) But after the first looks and when people start digging
Perl they tend to change their first idea ;-)
[thanks to Gabriel of Lisboa.pm for the Portuguese lesson :)]
Barebones Software, makers of
BBEdit for the Macintosh, adds MacPerl integration in version 5.1. (May)
Linux Journal
interviews
Larry about Perl and OpenSource. Larry is pictured on the cover
sitting next to a big shiny pearl. (May)
The Perl Journal Strikes Deal With EarthWeb who will take control
of The Perl Journal
online, providing a new
interface and subscriber-only access to articles online. (5 May)
perltootc,
Tom Christiansens' tutorial on class data is released. (May)
O'Reilly makes the book "Open Sources: Voices From the Revolution"
freely
available on the web.
Joseph Hall
announces
the perl-visioneers mailing list for discussing the future of Perl to
much grumbling from the P5P crowd. (26 May)
Mark-Jason Dominus proves that it really iseasier to
write a
syntactically
correct Perl program than various other languages. (31 May)
Slashdot announces that Larry and Weird Al Yankovic were separated at
birth.
And besides, if Perl really takes off in the Windows space,
I think the rest of us would just as soon have a double-agent
within ActiveState. :-)
-- Larry Wall in 199807172334.QAA18255@wall.org
Neil Stephenson publishes the
Cryptonomicon which features
a few Perl bits. There is also a
module on CPAN for the Solitaire encryption system from the book.(June)
ActiveState announces a three year
agreement
with Microsoft to help development of Perl on the Windows Platform.
(1 June)
Vicki Brown starts the "Fun With Perl"
mailing list. (June)
The Register publishes an article that Microsoft is worried that
Linux is outselling Windows98. (4 June)
The NPR show
"Talk of the Nation"
interviews Tim O'Reilly, Steven Levy and Scott Bradner on "OpenSource Software and the Future of the PC".
(11 June)
OSI abandons its efforts to
trademark
'Open Source' and decides to try and get 'OSI Certified' trademarked
instead. This is almost as controversial as the Linux trademark
dispute in
1996 when it was discovered William R. Della Croce, Jr. held the
trademark to Linux and whom eventually signed the trademark over to
Linus Torvalds. (17 June)
YAPC or﹃Yet
Another Perl Conference﹄hosted by Kevin Lenzo and Carnegie-Mellon
University. A inexpensive, grass-roots gathering of Perl people and
fun. Larry Wall gives the keynote and many other luminaries of Perl
attend. The conference is a smashing success and will be hosted again
next year at CMU. Brent Michalski
covered
the conference for perl.com. Though there was a fund shortage, there
was a collection at the closing talks to make up the difference. Among
the fun things were: (24-25 June)
●Larry's keynote which he gave despite the fact that the airlines shipped his things elsewhere.
●Michael Schwern's "Ineffective Perl Programming"
●Effective Perl Mongering
●The History of Perl and Its Culture
●An evening of geeks annotating the movie "The Matrix"
●The #perl group photo
●Jon Orwant's conclusion "Use Perl or you will die"
●The Perl Mongers announce the White
Camel Awards to recognize the "unsung heros" of the Perl
community.
●Freesides' pictures
●The two grand dames of Perl, Abigail and HappyFunBall finally meet. :)
Tom channels Sammy Davis, Jr. and submits The Perlfaq
Man jingle. o/~ Who can take a rainbow...o/~ (25 June)
CPAST is announced as a repository for the Perl Timeline and other
resources of historical interest for the community. (5 July)
Ladnar is unveiled to the unsuspecting. :) (5 July)
Chris Nandor is reported as Perl's very first All-Star Hacker. (7 July)
Hacker fouls off All-Star site
By Margaret Kane 07/08/99 02:09:00 PM
A Red Sox fan cast more than 25,000 votes at baseball's All-Star site to
push Boston shortstop ahead of Yankee rival.
One of the biggest rivalries in baseball just got digital.
A 25-year-old Boston Red Sox fan cast around 25,000 votes for shortstop
Nomar Garciaparra on Major League Baseball's All-Star game voting site.
The site allowed users to log on to vote for players. Starters for the
game are chosen by the fans, with ballots distributed at games and
through promotions. The League also allowed fans to go online and vote,
but was supposed to restrict the number of times they could cast a ballot
to 22, equal to the number of times ballots were distributed at each
Major League ballpark.
But when Sox fan Chris Nandor heard that Garciaparra was trailing New
York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter by around 20,000 votes, he decided to
bump that limit up a bit, the Boston Globe reported.
He cast 25,259 votes for Garciaparra and other Red Sox players on the
last day of online voting, said officials for SportsLine USA Inc.
(Nasdaq:SPLN), which developed the League's All-Star site. The hacker
used a Perl script to repeatedly submit the entries to the Web site.
[...]
Object Oriented Perl
by Damian Conway is published by Manning (July)
Mastering
Algorithms with Perl, a.k.a. the Wolf or MAWP, is published by
O'Reilly. (August)
TPC3, the Third Annual Perl Conference is
held in Monterey, California as part of a large
OpenSource Convention
sponsored by O'Reilly which includes the Sendmail, Apache, Linux,
Python, Tcl/Tk and OpenSource communities.
●Larry gives his 3rd
State of the Onion speech.
●Brent Michalski reports on
the conference.
●Pictures... and more
pictures.
Xanadu is implemented in Perl.
Camel discovered in
integrated circuit. (August)
Mailing list for librarians
using Perl is announced. (August)
O'Reilly releases the Perl CD Bookshelf. (August)
The Perl Packrats mailing list is revived. (September)
Valueclick begins hosting
perl.org and cpan.org, taking over from the defunct
TPI. (September)
Camp Camel
hosted by Brent Michalski where a few bad Perl books and some CDs were
taken as casualties. (September)
Issue #15 of The Perl Journal
comes to the on-line world. (September)
Chip Salzenberg discusses Topaz:Perl for the 22nd Century. (September)
Linux Magazine publishes
Uncultured
Perl. (October)
Linuxplanet publishes an interview
with Tim O'Reilly. (October)
iPlanet, the web server formerly known as Netscape Enterprise
Server is bundled with the
Velocigen
application engine. (October)
Manning Publications releases
Elements of
Programming with Perl, an introductory Perl book by Andrew
L. Johnson. (October)
Mark-Jason Dominus assumes the position of Managing Editor for
O'Reilly's www.perl.com content and begins publishing
P5P - The Week in
Review, a digest of the Perl5-Porters mailing list. (October)
A mailing list for Perl trainers is organised by Kirrily "Skud"
Robert. (October)
Chris Nandor introduces his
Perl Portal and later
writes an article about RSS and
You. (November)
Acontest
to guess the number of localtime-related bug reports reported in the
year 2000. (November)
An interview with Simon Cozens about Teaching Perl to
First-time Programmers. (November)
The Seven Deadly Sins are revisited. (November)
SAMS publishes
Teach Yourself
Perl in 24 Hours by Clinton Pierce. (December)
2000
a.k.a. 19100 or The Year in Schwern's Pants
It should be illegal to yell "Y2K" in a crowded economy. :-)
-- Larry Wall in <199811242326.PAA28495@wall.org>
VA Linux announces Sourceforge
for hosting OpenSource projects including Topaz. (January)
ActiveState
joins
the Python Consortium. (January)
Netizen publishes their Unix and Perl
courses under the Open Pulications License. (January)
PerlFAQPrime and its
"faqtoids" are released by Joseph Hall, et. al. (January)
The Perl Monks community
site is launched. No Latin required. Pax Vobiscum. (February)
Programming the
Perl DBI, a.k.a. the cheetah book, by Tim Bunce and Alligator Descartes
is published. (February)
Jon Orwant, editor of The Perl Journal and co-author of Mastering
Algorithms with Perl, is hired as CTO of O'Reilly. (February)
Jon Udell publishes
Perl
vs. Python, a thought provoking discussion for both
languages. (February)
The Korn Shell (ksh) source code is released. (1 March)
Chip Salzenberg starts a new mailing list, "Perl-Friends", after a
whirlwind of discontent on P5P. (March)
[...] if we decide this version of Perl is different enough to warrant a
new major version (which I'm beginning to think (and even mentioned in a
previous message (but nobody sprang for the bait))).
-- Larry Wall in <200002121919.LAA27974@kiev.wall.org>
After nearly 2 years in the making
Perl 5.6.0
is released as is ActivePerl 5.6 for Windows, Solaris and Linux. (March)
Lisa Nyman shows that the U.S. Census Bureau is using Perl to help
collect Census Data via the
web. (March)
A mailing list for discussing Perl
Certification is launched by Kirrily Robert. (March)
Microsoft
reports
that it will include ActivePerl 5.6 in the next release of MS Window
Services for Unix 2.0. (April)
Sendmail and ActiveState form a
partnership to embed Perl into the Sendmail API. (April)
The Perl Haiku Contest is announced. (April)
ActivePerl
with ASP and ADO is publised by Wiley. (April)
The Oxford English Dictionary investigates the origin of
the word "Perl" while considering it for an entry in the next edition. Perl will be included
and the entry will resemble the entry below.
Perl Brit.
Perl, perl, irreg. PERL
Computing.
perl n. ,
arbitrarily chosen for its positive connotations, with omission of
-a- to differentiate it from an existing programming language called
Pearl. Coined by Larry Wall in the summer of 1987; the program was
publicly released on 18 December of that year. Acronymic expansions of
the name (such as Practical Extraction and Report Language and
Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister), though found in the earliest
documention for the language, were formed after the name had been
chosen. Coinage details confirmed by personal communication from L.
Wall, May 2000. A high-level interpreted programming language widely
used for a variety of tasks and especially for applications running
on the World Wide Web. The form Perl is preferred for the language
itself; perl is used for the interpreter for the Perl language.
1988 J. Vromans Perl Reference Card.
WebTechniques touts perlscript as an emerging tool for ASP. (May)
ActiveState announces their plan to produce
Visual
Perl and Python. (May)
ActiveState
announces
Komodo, a Mozilla-based IDE. (May)
Betas of Python and Perl for the Intel Itanium Processor are
announced
by ActiveState. (May)
Chris Nandor, looking for a new challenge, creates
Use Perl; a Slashcode-esque community
news site for Perl. (May)
The handy Perl 5 Pocket Reference, 3rd Edition by Johan Vromans
is released and includes material for 5.6.0. (May)
The Geek Handbook by Mikki Halpin is published by Pocket Books and mentions Perl. (May)
Sometimes it is necessary to "go cowboy" on your geek and bring things to a standoff. When your geek blandly tells you that
something isn't possible, thank him for his time. Suggest that he is clearly very busy, and that you will attempt to solve the problem yourself.
Tell your geek you will need root access for this, and demand all passwords necessary. Ask where the Camel Book is. Your geek will immediately
and grumblingly do what you need him to do. Act impressed and grateful. pp. 51
Lincoln Stein is interviewed on NPR's
Morning Edition. (30 May)
The Perl Whirl 2000, an Alaskan cruise, Perl geeks and a Perl conference
for 7 days on big boat. Remember the 3 hour tour? (29 May - 5 June)
●Tim Bray muses about the cruise.
●Adam Turoff also writes about his adventures.
●A WebReview.com article.
●Wired Magazine features an article on the
Randal v. Tom conflict and manages to miss some of the more interesting personalities aboard the ship.
Yet Another Society hosts
Yet Another Perl Conference
yet again. (June)
●Frank Willison reports from YAPC
●Pictures from YAPC19100
●Larry Wall delivers the Pilgrim's Progress Keynote
●Damian Conway presents his Quantum::Superpositions to a much delighted crowd...in constant time.
●Jon Orwant continues the Post-apocalyptic Perl talk from last year.
●Abigail talks about JAPHs.
●The The Lightning Talks
were a real treat including this gem
by Nathan Torkington.
Q: How many programmers does it take to change a Sarathy?
A: None needed, Sarathys never burn out.
-- Larry Wall in <199912061924.LAA05516@kiev.wall.org>
Jarkko Hietaniemi is named pumpkin for the 5.8.0 release of Perl, thus giving Sarathy a much needed rest. Later
it would be apparent that, in light of Perl6, he would also be the last. (July)
Wrox Press, the people who feature pictures of authors on their front covers, spines, back covers and any other
free white space, release Beginning Perl
by Simon Cozens. (June)
(It may be interesting to note here that Addison-Wesley recently released their DevelopMentor series which
features pictures of headless non-techies on the covers as a direct retort to Wrox Press.)
John Tukey, the man who coined the term "software",
dies. (July)
Perl is touted as a hot skill by
Computer Weekly, a UK IT periodical. (July)
CGI Programming with Perl, 2nd Edition, a.k.a. the mouse book,
by Scott Guelich, Shishir Gundavaram, and Gunther Birznieks is published by ORA. (July)
Down *every* path lies madness, if you're talking about documentation.
-- Larry Wall in <200002081801.KAA00141@kiev.wall.org>
The long awaited Programming Perl, 3rd Edition,
a.k.a. the Camel3, by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen & Jon Orwant is released. It is a marvelous update to the Blue Camel. (July)
Kevin Lenzo decides to incorporate Yet Another Society to keep the YAPC organisation
running. (July)
Perl for System Administration, a.k.a the walking dead sea otter book,
by David N. Blank-Edelman is published. (July)
TPC4, not to be confused with Perl4, is held again in Monterey, CA
during the O'Reilly
OpenSource Convention. In this year's conference Dr. Damian
Conway already has a track of his own, and the TPC5 is expected to be
renamed TCC1 as Dr Conway completes his coup d'état. (July)
●The 4th State of the Onion
●The Big News[tm] was the announcement of Perl6 development to
begin with a projected alpha release due out by Summer 2001.
●Mark-Jason Dominus reports on the Perl6 announcement
and what it all means.
●The White Camel Awards were given to 3
recipients again this year.
●The Haiku Contest 2000 winners are announced.
●The Perl Golf Apocalypse
●One attendee's journal from the conference.
●Julian Axolotl's photos.
●Dr. Dobb's Journal taped the State of the Onion as well as offering a few other links.
David Bryant discovers Captain Perl....you'll just have to see it for yourself. (August)
The London Perl Mongers adopt a camel at the London Zoo. (August)
Joe Johnston interviews Damain Conway for perl.com.
Warning: You may be disturbed by the notion of a 'Perl Hunks Calendar'. (August)
ZDTV interviews Larry about Perl6. (September)
Cross-Platform Perl, 2nd Edition by Eric Foster-Johnson is
published by IDG Books. (September)
McGraw-Hill publishes Debugging Perl by
Martin Brown. (September)
Yet Another Society hosts it's first YAPC::Europe conference in London, England at the
Institute for Contemporary Arts. The venue was very cozy, the talks were great and many of the people who couldn't attend
the conferences in the US were able to come and enjoy meeting and greeting those they had previously only known via the ethernet. (September)
●Mark Summerfield reported on the event for perl.com
●Paula Ferguson's whirlwind account.
●Philip Newton's pictures
IndigoPerl5.6 nee DynamicPerl, produced by the same people who
do Perl2EXE, is released. It has a package manager that plays well with CPAN modules, ActiveState's PPM and it's own module
interface, and has an apache webserver for developing CGI and other web applications. (August)
Segfault reveals the shocking truth that
Al Gore's mother invented Perl. (September)
As an example of how Perl has helped the Internet grow, Gore noted, "Even monkeys have been trained to develop
web site data processing routines. You might visit heyheywearethemonkeys.com for their work. I've even decided to invest
in iMonkey, a new portal site for our world's endangered species."
Carlos Ramirez unveils perldoc.com, a snazzy perl documentation web site. (September)
The Perl Journal introduces the First Annual Readable Perl
Contest. (September)
Perl MS Office Clone called "gift from god".(September)
Lisa Nyman is featured in the Washington Post. Lisa
was instrumental in the Census Bureau using Perl for their on-line census and is a DC.pm member. (October)
Hungry Minds, nee IDG Books, publish the Perl for Dummies, 3rd Edition.
MJD has a review of the 2nd Edition that may be worth comparing to the 3rd Edition. (October)
ActiveState announces PerlMX, A Perl plug-in
for Sendmail. (October)
Dr. Dobb's Journal unveil a new Perl section edited by Brent Michalski. (October)
Obviously I was either onto something, or on something.
-- Larry Wall on the creation of Perl
At the 4th Annual Linux Showcase in Atlanta, Larry Wall gave Camel Lot #6
discussing Perl past, present and future. A transcription is available, a list of Perl6 points made
and a Dr. Dobb's TechNetCast. (October)
YAS raises $75,000USD in two weeks to fund Damian Conway for a year to work on Perl6 and keep a
diary of his adventures. (October)
MJD publishes a critique of the Perl6 RFC process and Jarkko Hietaniemi
responds with a somewhat more optimistic rebuttal. (October)
Sybex publishes Perl! I Didnt Know You Could Do That...
by Martin Brown and wins the award for most disturbing Perl book cover. (November)
New Riders releases
Win32 Perl Scripting: The Administrator's Handbook by Dave Roth. (November)
Matt Sergeant announces a new mod_perl portal for news and information in the
mod_perl world. (November)
Web Techniques awards ActivePerl5.6 the 'Readers Choice' award in the programming category of their
annual Web Tools Awards. (November)
The judges felt ActivePerl managed to convince Perl developers to begin building sites with Active Server Pages.
Readers were most impressed with the product's ability to develop within an ASP environment and still have access to
what made Perl popular in the first place: pattern matching and regular expressions, the Perl built-in functions, and
a vast library of free or low-cost Perl modules to use in your code.
Mark Fowler has a bit of fun with his Perl Module Advent Calendar. (1 December)
Perl: A Beginner's Guide by R. Allen Wyke
and Donald B. Thomas is published by Osborne. (15 December)
Brad Kuhn resurrects the perljvm project. (18 December)
The Perl Mailinglist Database is made available to the perusing public. (24 December)
Chris "Pudge" Nandor takes the lead of MacPerl development as Matthias Neeracher steps down to pursue other projects. (27 December)
O'Reilly releases a bound copy of The mod_perl Pocket Guide by
Andrew Ford. (December)
2001
Starting the year off with a bang, Earthweb, the company that purchased The Perl Journal sells off a large portion of its properties.
Jon Orwant details the impending doom and demise of the
publication that brought us all so much joy. (2 January)
Yet Another Society is granted its 501(c)(3) non-profit status paving the way for charitable contributions and more projects
and funding. (4 January)
Damian Conway, our indentured servant for Perl6, unveils The Conway Channel for keeping
up with him (or trying to). (4 January)
Addison-Wesley publishes Network Programming with Perl
by Lincoln Stein. (9 January)
Larry Wall is interviewed by Linux Weekly News about Perl in general and about
Perl6. (17 January)
Manning releases Data Munging with Perl by Dave Cross. (January)
Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution by Glyn Moody
is published by Perseus Press. The book is one of the best chronicles of the history of Linux and includes a small section on Perl including the
following quote from an interview with Larry Wall: (23 January)
"Pretty soon after [Perl] was released there were requests for a Perl newsgroup," he recalls,﹃and I put that off. I didn't want a
Perl newsgroup because I didn't want to be ghettoized. The dynamic of how Usenet worked, at least back then, was if you posted something
off-topic for the newsgroup then people would say, 'Well, take it to this other newsgroup,﹄he explains. I didn't want people to be able
to say that about Perl, so basically we infested the shell programming newsgroup, and whenever anyone would say, 'How can I do such and so?'
we would very politely say, 'Well, here's how you might do it in a shell, but it's easier in Perl, you do it this way,'"[...]
Wall eventually created a newsgroup for Perl; this helped foster a sense of community and provided a forum for feedback. But
alongside bug reports and bug fixes, one type of feedback was particularly important. "There's one message I send out again and again,"
Wall says. "Somebody will send me some sort of thank you or whatever, and I'll respond, 'Thanks, I run on encouragement like that.'"
Perl is mentioned in the DeCSS amici curiae filed by Brian Kernighan, Marvin Minsky,
Ron Rivest, Richard Stallman, et. al. to accompany the appeal filed by the EFF and 2600. (24 January)
The Guardian prints an article about Open Source that also
mentions Perl rather favourably. (25 January)
ActiveState announces the new Programmers' Choice Awards for Perl and Python. The
recipients were nominated by and voted for by the programmers in the community. (15 February )
Expanding its scripting language offerings, ActiveState announces
that they will be producing and supporting Tcl in the wake of the demise of Scriptics and will be hosting the Tcl community website.
(26 February)
Wrox Press publishes Professional Perl Programming by Peter
Wainwright, et. al. (27 February)
The Deutscher Perl-Workshop 3.0 | German Perl Workshop 3.0 is hosted by
Campus Sankt Augustin (bei Bonn) | Polytechnic/University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Sankt Augustin Campus (near Bonn), Germany.
In previous years, this conference/workshop even had a camel [bactrian not
dromedary] attend the event. (28 February-2 March)
Perl Debugged by Peter Scott and Ed Wright is released by
Addison-Wesley. (March)
Using only seven lines of Perl code, Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz create the shortest-yet method
for descrambling DVD copy protection (DeCSS). (7 March)
ActiveState assembles the Dream Team for its
technical advisory board: Larry Wall, Brendan Eich, Guido van Rossum, Rasmus Lerdorf, and Jon Udell. (27 March)
Larry Wall and Guido van Rossum reveal their
plans for joint Perl and Python development to be called Parrot. (1 April)
Apocalypse 1: The Ugly, The Bad, and the Good is published giving
many people hope that Perl6 will be a reality and that Larry is really alive after months of silence. (2 April)
ActiveState unveils its ASPN. (6 April)
The SourceXchange closes its doors. (6 April)
Sarathy releases Perl-5.6.1. (8 April)
Jarkko emits a large tarball he calls
Perl-5.7.1 one day after the release of 5.6.1. (9 April)
After several months of legal limbo, Jon Orwant announces that The Perl Journal is back in his hands, that issue #20 is
going to press and that he is hunting for a publisher to continue producing the publication we all sit by the mailbox waiting
for. (11 April)
If you don't know Perl, you don't know Dick. First
it was a bumper sticker, now it's an interview article on linux.com. :) (17 April)
Open Cola 1.0 is the first open source consumer product and
sports the following Perl code on the can: (24 April)
#!/usr/bin/perl
open CAN, "excitedly";
join ($can, $mouth);
while ($colaRemaining > 0)
{if ($reallyThirsty) {$chug;} else {$sip};}
dumpIN_RECYCLING_BOX;IN_RECYCLING_BOX;
Apocalypse 2 discussing the bits and pieces of Perl along with
the apocalypso for the newly Drs. Orwant. (3 May)
YAPC::America::North is hosted by Montréal at McGill University. (13-15 June)
The O'Reilly Perl Conference 5 is held in San Diego, CA. (23-27 July)
2002
Perl Whirl '02 sets sail to a warmer climate. It's time to start
working on the boss to approve the expense and learning how to spell and say Caribbean. Gilligan's Island with Perl.(12 January)
This list and all the urls in the timeline can also be found at the Perl Bookmark Database.
Developer Pages
●Perl.com, the mother of all Perl sites.
●cpan.org, the definitive Perl archive.
●The CPAN FAQ.
●The Perl FAQs.
●Perl Documentation.
●Perl Advocacy.
●Perl book reviews and more book reviews.
●A nicely indexed and current Perl reference list
●Another reference list of Perl bookmarks.
●The Perlbug database with web interface. (Thank you Richard Foley)
●The CPAN testers results page.
●The CPAN search page and its companion, WAIT. Both are very useful resources for finding information in CPAN.
●CPAN Search, perldoc.com and more docs .
●;login
Perl articles by Hal Pomeranz between 1993 and 1997.
●Tom Christiansens' PPT Project.
●Proper patching methods as described by Tom Christiansen
●Tom's grab bag of assorted interesting stuff.
●Tom's Perl5 Overview 12.93
●Perl Guts Illustrated by Gisle Aas
●Apaper comparing C, C++, Java and Perl.
●The Perl Mailing List Database.
●All the Perl News you can handle.
●mod_perl for Apache. Get it.
●Matt Sergeant's Take23 mod_perl news and info portal.
●Mailing list archive for P5P and many other Perl lists.
●Perl module mechanics page with a lot of good module information and how-tos.
●The Perl FAQ a Day. Tastes great, less filling.
●Bradley Kuhn's online book/tutorial.
●Excellent RFC archive.
●The O'Reilly Network
●Freshmeat's Perl listings.
●O'Reilly's Perl Success Stories which may come in handy to help convince your boss that Perl is useful.
●Want to use the Camel on your web page? O'Reilly has a page detailing the usage of their dromedary friend and trademark.
●A small archive of retroperl.
●Valueclick has a large archive of ancient Perl.
Win32 Perl
●IndigoPerl.
●A Win32 script archive.
●ActiveState, purveyors of ActivePerl.
●Perl for Windows NT How-to.
●Perl for Win32 page that is well done and full of useful information and links.
●MSServices for Unix which include Perl.
MacPerl
●MacPerl FAQ.
●MacPerl Porters.
●MacPerl Book.
●The MacPerl Home Page.
Larry's Speeches and Interviews
●State of the Onion from TPC1.
●State of the Onion from TPC2.
●State of the Onion from TPC3.
●State of the Onion from TPC4.
●Webreview interview.
●A DDJ interview with Larry. Worth reading. (2.98)
●Dr. Dobb's TechNetCast Archive of Larry's talks.
●Larry's Natural Language paper.
●Larry's very own, and very amusing, Geek Code.
●Salon Magazine's "The Joy of Perl". (10.98)
●Feed Magazine's Divine Intervention interview. (2.99)
●Amazon.com inteview with Larry after an XML conference. (4.98)
●Softpanorama Society honors Larry in their OpenSource Hall of Fame.
●The ACM publication Crossroads features and interview with Larry. (12.94)
●Camel Lot #6
●Interview with Paula Gordon during the Atlanta Linux Showcase in October 2000.
Other Timelines, Histories and Archives
●Webreview has a nice OSS '97-'98 timeline.
●Webreview article on Perl and brief history.
●The perlhist pod by Jarkko.
●Abrief history of Perl at perl.com.
●News.com has an"Evolution of a Net Community" timeline.
●Forbes Magazine publishes a Linux Timeline.
●A snazzy, if a bit overdone, Java timeline.
●Who is Sun Microsystems.
●ADNS historical timeline.
●Another OpenSource software, Sendmail.
●Eric Raymonds History of Hackerdom.
●A brief, but well done, history of Usenet.
●Abrief history of the internet.
●Keith Lynch's net timeline if a bit ecclectic.
●A spiffy graphical timeline at BBN tracing the history from the people who put the "@" in your email.
●GTE has a very interesting telecommunications timeline.
●Ousterhout's history of Tcl/Tk.
●O'Reilly's Perl News Article Archive.
●The Net.legends FAQ.
●The Apache Project describes its roots.
●Debian Linux Project History.
●A statistical history of fetchmail.
●The history of UNIX
●A really cool family tree diagram for Unix.
●A look at Unix Tools and how they helped shape the future as well as the past
●A history of the Macintosh at Stanford.
●The story of the ping program.
●The GUI Timeline and GUI Gallery
OpenSource
●Aroundtable discussion hosted by amazon.com discussing OpenSource.
●Another history of the OpenSource movement.
●History of the Open Source Effort.
●Forbes article from May 1999 regarding the OpenSource bandwagon.
●O'Reilly's OpenSource web site.
●O'Reilly's OpenSource biliography.
●The entire text of "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution" is available on-line.
●An excellent list of OSS Articles from Feed Magazine. Also a brief timeline.
●Eben Moglen's "Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright", which is a delightful look at OpenSource through the viewpoint of the law.
●Wired Magazine's Tour de Source guide to the Open Source start-ups.
●The Attentions Economy and the Net is an interesting look at the economics of the web and our descreasing attention span.
●Internet, Innovation and Open Source by Ilkka Tuomi
●Homesteading the Noosphere where Eric Raymond examines the hacker culture and emerging Open Source culture.
A Few OpenSource Companies
●Caldera
●Sendmail, Inc.
●Scriptics
●Linuxcare
●Redhat Linux
●Activestate
●Walnut Creek CDROM
●Berkeley Software Design, Inc.
●C2NET
●Cyclades
Perl Conferences
●O'Reilly's Perl Conference
●Yet Another Perl Conference, a.k.a YAPC
●A German Perl Workshop.
●O'Reilly's Japanese Perl/Ruby Con. (cute pun on rubicon :)
General and Miscellaneous
●Got your magnetic Perl kit yet? Get thee to Perl Toys and order one now.
●Nerd Gear has cool JAPH shirts.
●Think Geek offers a Camel JAPH shirt.
●Do you have your Perl Geek Code yet?
●Dr. Dobbs Journal article on Perl from December 1995.
●Neil Stephensen's essay on the evolution of OSs.
●Taken the Perl Purity Test yet?
●The Jargon File.
●Got your Perl Monger shirt and hat yet?
●The Hacker FAQ for the clueless manager.
●Geek Chic hats, etc. with a large portion of the sales going to support OpenSource endeavours.
●Extropia's page of hacks, some of which are written in Perl.
Perl Training and Support
●Stonehenge Consulting Services run by Randal Schwartz.
●Joseph Hall's Perl training.
●Tom Christiansen's Perl Consultancy.
●Sun Education offers "Perl Programming".
●Chip Salzenberg's perlsupport.com offering technical support and solutions for Perl.
●The Perl Clinic operated by ActiveState and The Ingram Group offer professional support on an annual or per incident basis.
Other Useful Perl Pages
●Lincoln Stein's fine web page.
●Mark-Jason Dominus' Perl Paraphernalia page chock full of Perl treats.
●Alligator Descartes Perl page with the DBI page being a special feature.
●Graham Barr's homepage with lots of good information on his modules like IO and libnet.
●Joseph Hall's web page and be sure to check out Innocent Inanimate Objects.
●Malcom Beattie's spot on the web.
●Brent Michalski's perlguy page.
●Pudge's pad.
●Perl & XML page by Michel Rodriguez. Excellent resource.
●Yahoo's Perl site index.
●Dale Bewley's Perl page which is nicely organised.
●Confused about which Perl book to buy? Go to The Perl Book Buying Guide.
●Jonathan Eisenzopf's "Mother of Perl" site. Nice tutorials.
●The Perl Zone.
●Kevin's Perl Script Site.
●The Other Kevin's infotastic page.
●The Perl Shell page.
●Practical Perl Programming tutorial
●Just some guy's Perl page
●japhy's Perl collection.
●[HIT] Hobbes' Internet Timeline v4.1
●brian d foy for capturing that most priceless picture of Randal singing Happy Birthday to Perl.
The Timeline of Perl and its Culture
©1999-2001 Elaine Ashton. Permission is granted for use of
this document in whole or in part for non-commercial purposes. For
commercial uses, please contact the author first. Links to this
document are welcome after e-mailing the author with the document URL
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