On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 05:29:29PM +0000, Dave Cross wrote: > At the LPW on Saturday I'm giving a talk entitled "25 Years of Perl"
Great idea. An amusing anecdote from the very early days that illustrates how Perl attracted some of its early users is that merlyn relentlessly answered requests for Unix sed, awk, and shell help with snippets of *Perl* code. Indeed, he did this so often that posters began inserting "No Perl please" in their posts! As you might expect, that served only to increase the volume of Perl snippet responses. Because merlyn knew shell, sed and awk so well, he could answer questions in the requested language ... and then compare and contrast with a more elegant Perl solution. BTW, I believe this at least partly explains why merlyn formed part of the 2.7% who voted _against_ the formation of a separate comp.lang.perl newsgroup in 1989. The old use.perl.org links to verify this are broken unfortunately. Though I found a wayback machine link: http://web.archive.org/web/20041225063326/http://use.perl.org/comments.pl?sid=10975&cid=16619 Oh, and here is a (hopefully not broken) link to the original 1989 vote for comp.lang.perl, carried by 205 votes to 7: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/news.groups/bjii5Z9iJgY/RgAl62J00OUJ /-\