• In a thread on what motivates a programmer, Larry mentions Perl and the now-famous quote "The two chief virtues in a programmer are laziness and impatience." This was in the pre-hubris days of course.
• later in that same thread Larry is forced to give a description of Perl (with some examples) when someone asks "So what is this program 'perl'?"
• Finally the first public distribution of Perl 1.0 (1988-02-01 05:46:32 PST). Just seeing code in multi-part shars was a real trip down memory lane for me... I wonder if something like that would meet their significance threshold for inclusion in their timeline?

Update: Thanks ar0n! Here is the actual posting in which AST tells Linus

Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design :-)

Update 2: Yes I noticed that good one jmerelo but I didn't list it as it didn't describe Perl much. Another one I ran across was this which is not much later and the .sig comment perhaps shows just how popular Perl had become in a short time. BTW some may recall Mark Biggar being referred to as "Perl's maternal uncle" for many years.

--
I'd like to be able to assign to an luser

So I got to looking at the first perl node that you mention... what an incredibly interesting piece of history! Larry pretty much had the right idea all along :) I however especially like his sample code:

#!/bin/perl

$SIG{'QUIT'} = 'quit';            # install signal handler for SIGQUIT

while ($ARGV[0] =~ /^-/) {        # parse switches
    $ARGV[0] =~ /^-h/ && ($showhost++,$silent++,shift,next);
    $ARGV[0] =~ /^-s/ && ($silent++,shift,next);
    $ARGV[0] =~ /^-d/ && ($dodist++,shift,next);
    $ARGV[0] =~ /^-n/ && ($n=' -n',shift,next);
    $ARGV[0] =~ /^-l/ && ($l=' -l ' . $ARGV[1],shift,shift,next);
    last;
}

$systype = shift;            # get name representing set of hosts

while ($ARGV[0] =~ /^-/) {        # we allow switches afterwards too
    $ARGV[0] =~ /^-h/ && ($showhost++,$silent++,shift,next);
    $ARGV[0] =~ /^-s/ && ($silent++,shift,next);
    $ARGV[0] =~ /^-d/ && ($dodist++,shift,next);
    $ARGV[0] =~ /^-n/ && ($n=' -n',shift,next);
    $ARGV[0] =~ /^-l/ && ($l=' -l ' . $ARGV[1],shift,shift,next);
    last;
}

if ($dodist) {                # distribute input over all rshes?
    `cat >/tmp/gsh$$`;            #  get input into a handy place
    $dist = " </tmp/gsh$$";        #  each rsh takes input from there
}

$cmd = join(' ',@ARGV);            # remaining args constitute the com
+mand
$cmd =~ s/'/'"'"'/g;            # quote any embedded single quotes

open(ghosts, '/etc/ghosts') || die 'No /etc/ghosts file';
                    # /etc/ghosts drives the rest

$one_of_these = ":$systype:";        # prepare to expand "macros"
if ($systype =~ s/\+/[+]/g) {        # we hope to end up with list of
    $one_of_these =~ s/\+/:/g;        #  colon separated attributes
}

line: while (<ghosts>) {        # for each line of ghosts

    s/[ \t]*\n//;            # trim leading whitespace
    if (!$_ || /^#/) {            # skip blank line or comment
    next line;
    }

    if (/^([a-zA-Z_0-9]+)=(.+)/) {    # a macro line?
    $name = $1; $repl = $2;
    $repl =~ s/\+/:/g;
    $one_of_these =~ s/:$name:/:$repl:/;    # do expansion in "wanted"
+ list
    next line;
    }

    # we have a normal line

    @attr = split;            # a list of attributes to match against
                    #   which we put into an array
    $host = $attr[0];            # the first attribute is the host nam
+e
    if ($showhost) {
    $showhost = "$host:\t";
    }

    attr: while ($attr = pop(attr)) {            # iterate over gh arr
+ay
    if (index($one_of_these,":$attr:") >=0) {    # is host wanted?
        unless ($silent) { print "rsh $host$l$n '$cmd'\n"; }
        $SIG{'INT'} = 'DEFAULT';
        if (open(pipe,"rsh $host$l$n '$cmd'$dist |")) {    # start rsh
        $SIG{'INT'} = 'cont';
        while (<pipe>) { print $showhost,$_; }        # show results
        close(pipe);
        } else {
        $SIG{'INT'} = 'cont';
        print "(Can't execute rsh.)\n";
        }
        last attr;                # don't select host twice
    }
    }
}

unlink "/tmp/gsh$$" if $dodist;

# here are a couple of subroutines that serve as signal handlers

sub cont {
    print "\rContinuing...\n";
}

sub quit {
    $| = 1;
    print "\r";
    $SIG{'INT'} = '';
    kill 2, $$;
}
[download]

:) I think it'd be fun to translate that to perl 5 (or 6 even) and use all of the new tools... funny thing is, that code would be chastized on perlmonks like crazy... no strict, no -w, handrolled commandline parsing! tsk tsk tsk. (I know that Perl back then didn't have these things, my sarcasm flag is set to 1 :) Also, a very interesting little historical sidenote:

I wasn't going to add a "goto" except that the sed-to-perl translator needed one.

:) how fun is that! Also of note: On top of which, C didn't have the picture-style report formats I wanted. And I didn't want to do a make every time I tweaked the program. I take it he is talking about perl formats... a feature that has now been voted out of the core and into a module (if memory serves me right...) So, I guess that says a few things about how perl has moved from a systems management / formatting language to a much more general beast. I guess he succeeded when he said he wanted to make a language that is: intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal).

I most want to find the actual exchange in which Andy Tanenbaum tells Linus Torvalds that he'd have failed him ...

It's here.

[ ar0n -- want job (boston) ]

Actually, the first Perl mention seems to be this one

Faigin, Larry's coworker, mentions Perl as Larry's "3-month old child", together with his real and "programatic children"

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Doubtless yours is one of the first, but I believe that this one not only came earlier, but appears to deal with the same or a similar flaw (it's hard to say as you wisely didn't detail your flaw publicly at the time). There are a few even earlier security hole announcements, but you're up there with the pioneers to be sure!

--
I'd like to be able to assign to an luser

Quite funny to see words 'computer mail' in that post. I've not seen it before. I wonder how long exist word 'email'.

--
Ilya Martynov (http://martynov.org/)

Or for that matter, how long before the improper pluralization resulted in (gag) "emails". Bleh.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

I don't know how long email has existed as a word, but I know when I started to use it.

It was in 1997 after I read what Knuth had to say on the subject of email. (At that point it was decidedly odd to see email instead of e-mail.)

Damn, this post is 18 days older than me. I've missed soo much :-(

--
package Lizard::King;
sub can { do { 'anything'} };
[download]

Web Site - http://www.asciimation.co.nz
Or telnet to towel.blinkenlights.nl

I can't really imagine waiting until 1997 to see all nine parts of the Star Wars series.

The horror of hindsight.

----Asim, known to some as Woodrow.