# Perl

Perl is a family of high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages, originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier
    CONTENT : A - F , G - L , M - R , S - Z , See also , External links

## Quotes

    Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author

### A - F

* Perl is the most popular web programming language. Over a million people program with Perl. That is approximately one Perl programmer for every resident of Hyderabad, Pakistan or Donetsk, Ukraine.
** John P. Flynt (2006) Perl Power!: The Comprehensive Guide. p. 7

### G - L

* Perl is the most popular language for creating CGI programs. Perl is the acronym for Practical Extraction and Report Language. Every computer platform supports this language and hence widely used.
** K. L. James (2004) The Internet: A User's Guide. p. 192
* Perl is the ultimate language for text manipulation, and it has powerful tools for manipulation of lists and other data structures.
** James M. Kretchmar (2004) Open Source Network Administration. p. 215
* And what defines a 'python activist' anyway? Blowing up Perl installations worldwide?
** Ivan Van Laningham, June 2005, on comp. lang. python

### M - R

* Last night, I drifted off while reading a Lisp book. Suddenly, I was bathed in a suffusion of blue. At once, just like they said, I felt a great enlightenment. I saw the naked structure of Lisp code unfold before me. (My god. It's full of "car"s.) The patterns and metapatterns danced. Syntax faded, and I swam in the purity of quantified conception. Of ideas manifest. Truly, this was the language from which the Gods wrought the universe! [God replies:] "No, it's not. [...] I mean, ostensibly, yes. Honestly, we hacked most of it together with Perl."
** Randall Munroe, XKCD 224
* Some said the world should be in Perl, Some said in Lisp. Now, having given both a whirl, I held with those who favored Perl. But I fear we passed to men A disappointing founding myth. And should we write it all again, I'd end it with A close-paren.
** Randall Munroe, "With Apologies to Robert Frost", XKCD 312, in a parody of Robert Frost
* As it seems to me, in Perl you have to be an expert to correctly make a nested data structure like, say, a list of hashes of instances. In Python, you have to be an idiot not to be able to do it, because you just write it down.
** Peter Norvig, August 2000, on comp.lang.functional
* Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl.
** Rob Pike (2004) in interview at slashdot.com, Oct 18 2004
* There's no obfuscated Perl contest because it's pointless.
** Jeff Polk quoted in Donn Seeley (2004) "How Not to Write Fortran in Any Language." Queue. Dec/Jan 2004-05. p. 58

### S - Z

* Haskell is faster than C++, more concise than Perl, more regular than Python, more flexible than Ruby, more typeful than C#, more robust than Java, and has absolutely nothing in common with PHP.
** Audrey Tang Perl Internationalization and Haskell: An Interview with Autrijus Tang
* If you can't do bioinformatics, you can't do biology, and Perl is the biologist's favorite language for doing bioinformatics.
** James Tisdall (2010) Mastering Perl for Bioinformatics
* Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something.
** Larry Wall (1990) Usenet article <9682@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> (1990)
* A Perl script is "correct" if it gets the job done before your boss fires you.
** Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant (2000) Programming Perl. O'Reilly Media, Inc. p. xviii
* The camel has evolved to be relatively self-sufficient. (On the other hand, the camel has not evolved to smell good. Neither has Perl.)
** Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant (2000) Programming Perl. O'Reilly Media, Inc. p. 4
* [Boxed] Multiple bouncing balls in a box are a metaphor for community. Notice how the escaping balls explode. This is what happens to people who move from Perl to Ruby.
** Larry Wall "The State of the Onion", perl.com, 2004-08-18 : In reference to the boxed screensaver that comes with xscreensaver.
* Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.
** Larry Wall, cited in Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington (2004) Perl Cookbook second edition p. 150
* Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.
** Larry Wall in "Perl style guide" perldoc.perl.org, 2005-2013

## See also

* Programming languages