History of Programming Languages III was AFC Book Listing, Big Update 3474

Eric Smith

Actually looking at Dennis Ritchie's HOPL-II presentation I think the best interpretation is his conclusion on "how to succeed":

* Here's how to succeed: by being lucky. Grab on to something * that's moving pretty fast. Let yourself be carried on when you're * in the right place at the right time.

Perl was obviously propelled at breakneck speed by some really fast-moving technologies in the late 90's and managed (miraculously!) to come through largely unscathed. (Although the huge stacks of books on CGI that claimed something about Perl may have done some damage to the general perception.) My opinion is that Perl did more of the carrying and less of the "being carried by" in fact.

CPAN obviously comes into the equation at bringing what used to be called "code re-use" to a whole new level and is NOT a minor factor.

Dennis's talk also related some lesson about the interface between language and the OS. Early on in Perl, the interface was the same as C's (using the idioms of syscalls and turning system C #includes into perl interfaces via some automation), later on some really powerful abstractions relating not just to the "OS" but also to the world at large (web servers, web clients, all other kinds of servers, all other kinds of clients) was done very nicely in Perl. (And then sometimes redone too!)

Tim.