Preface
Content:
Perl in a Nutshell
Perl is a language for getting your job done
Of course. if your job is programming.you can get your job done with any "complete" computer language. theoretically speaking. But we konw from experience that computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible.but in what they make easy. At one extreme. the so-called"fourth generation language" make it easy to do some thing. but nearly nearly impossible to do other things. At the other extreme, certain well known, "industrial-strength" languages make it equally difficult to do almost everything!
Perl is different. In the nutshell. Perl is designed to make the easy job easy, without making the hard jobs impossible.
And what are these "easy jobs" that ought to be easy? The ones you do every day, of course. You want a language that makes it easy to manipulate numbers and test, files and directores, computers and networks, and especially programs. It should be easy to run external programs and scan their output for interesting tidbits. It should be easy to send those same tidbits off to other programs that can do special thing with them. It should be easy to develop, modify and debug your own programs too. And, of couse, it should be easy to compile and run your programs, and do it portably,on any modern operating system.
Perl does all that, and a whole lot more.
Initially designed as a glue language for the UNIX operating systerm(or any of its myriad varants). Perl also runs on nmerous other systems. including MS_DOS, VMS. OS/2, Plan 9.Macintosh,and any variety of Windows you care to mention. It is one of the most protable programming languages availale today. To program C portably. you have to put in all those strange #ifdef markings for different operating systems. And to programming a shell protably. you have to remember the systax for each operating system'version of each command. and somehow find the least common denominator that(you hope) works everywhere. Perl happily avoids both of these problems, while relaining many of the benefits of both C and shell programming. with some additional magic of its own Much of the benefits of Perl has been fueled by the bankerings of former UNIX programmers who wanted to take along with them as much of the "old country" as they could. For them, Perl is the portable distillation of UNIX culture, an oasis in the wilderness of "can't get there from here". On the other hand, it works in the other firection, too:Web programmers are often delighted to discover that they can take their scripts from Windows machine and run them unchanged on their UNIX servers.
Althouth Perl is especially popular woth systems progrommers and Web developers, it also appeals to a much broader audience.The hitherto well-kept sercet is now out: Perl is no longer just for text processing.It has grown into a sophisticalcated,general-purpose programming language with a rich software development environment complete with debuggers. profilers, cross-referencers, compilers, interpreters, libraries, syntax-directed editors. and all the rest of the trappings of a "real" programming language. (But don't let that scare you:nothing
requires you to go tinkering under the bood.) Perl is being used daily in ervery imaginable field, from aerospace engineering to to molecular biology, from computer-assisted design/computer-assisted manufacuring(CAD/CAM) to document processing,from database manipualation to client-server network, managment, Perl is used by people who are desperate to analyze or convert lots of data quickly, whether you're talking DNA sequences, Web pages, or pork belly futures, Indeed, one of the jokes in the Perl community is that the next big stock market crash will probably be triggered by a bug in a Perl script. (On the brighter side, any unemployed stock analysts will still have a marketable skill, so to speak.)
There are many reason for the success of Perl. It certainly helps that Perl is freely available, and freely redistrbutable.But that's not enough to explain the Perl phenomenon, since many freeware packages fail to thrive, Perl is not just free: it's also fun. People feel like they can be creative in Perl, because they have freedom of expression: they get to choose what to optimize for, whether that's computer spped or programmer speed, verbosity or conciseness, readability or maintainability or reusability or portability or learnability or teachability, You can even optimize for obscurity, if you're entering an Obfuscated Perl contest
Content:
Perl in a Nutshell
Perl is a language for getting your job done
Of course. if your job is programming.you can get your job done with any "complete" computer language. theoretically speaking. But we konw from experience that computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible.but in what they make easy. At one extreme. the so-called"fourth generation language" make it easy to do some thing. but nearly nearly impossible to do other things. At the other extreme, certain well known, "industrial-strength" languages make it equally difficult to do almost everything!
Perl is different. In the nutshell. Perl is designed to make the easy job easy, without making the hard jobs impossible.
And what are these "easy jobs" that ought to be easy? The ones you do every day, of course. You want a language that makes it easy to manipulate numbers and test, files and directores, computers and networks, and especially programs. It should be easy to run external programs and scan their output for interesting tidbits. It should be easy to send those same tidbits off to other programs that can do special thing with them. It should be easy to develop, modify and debug your own programs too. And, of couse, it should be easy to compile and run your programs, and do it portably,on any modern operating system.
Perl does all that, and a whole lot more.
Initially designed as a glue language for the UNIX operating systerm(or any of its myriad varants). Perl also runs on nmerous other systems. including MS_DOS, VMS. OS/2, Plan 9.Macintosh,and any variety of Windows you care to mention. It is one of the most protable programming languages availale today. To program C portably. you have to put in all those strange #ifdef markings for different operating systems. And to programming a shell protably. you have to remember the systax for each operating system'version of each command. and somehow find the least common denominator that(you hope) works everywhere. Perl happily avoids both of these problems, while relaining many of the benefits of both C and shell programming. with some additional magic of its own Much of the benefits of Perl has been fueled by the bankerings of former UNIX programmers who wanted to take along with them as much of the "old country" as they could. For them, Perl is the portable distillation of UNIX culture, an oasis in the wilderness of "can't get there from here". On the other hand, it works in the other firection, too:Web programmers are often delighted to discover that they can take their scripts from Windows machine and run them unchanged on their UNIX servers.
Althouth Perl is especially popular woth systems progrommers and Web developers, it also appeals to a much broader audience.The hitherto well-kept sercet is now out: Perl is no longer just for text processing.It has grown into a sophisticalcated,general-purpose programming language with a rich software development environment complete with debuggers. profilers, cross-referencers, compilers, interpreters, libraries, syntax-directed editors. and all the rest of the trappings of a "real" programming language. (But don't let that scare you:nothing
requires you to go tinkering under the bood.) Perl is being used daily in ervery imaginable field, from aerospace engineering to to molecular biology, from computer-assisted design/computer-assisted manufacuring(CAD/CAM) to document processing,from database manipualation to client-server network, managment, Perl is used by people who are desperate to analyze or convert lots of data quickly, whether you're talking DNA sequences, Web pages, or pork belly futures, Indeed, one of the jokes in the Perl community is that the next big stock market crash will probably be triggered by a bug in a Perl script. (On the brighter side, any unemployed stock analysts will still have a marketable skill, so to speak.)
There are many reason for the success of Perl. It certainly helps that Perl is freely available, and freely redistrbutable.But that's not enough to explain the Perl phenomenon, since many freeware packages fail to thrive, Perl is not just free: it's also fun. People feel like they can be creative in Perl, because they have freedom of expression: they get to choose what to optimize for, whether that's computer spped or programmer speed, verbosity or conciseness, readability or maintainability or reusability or portability or learnability or teachability, You can even optimize for obscurity, if you're entering an Obfuscated Perl contest
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