Re: NSA's FoxAcid

Yeah… my understanding is quite a lot of the amoral garbage software the US Federal government and its various agencies (used to) use was written in Perl. I apparently contributed to this as a subcontractor once before learning for which five-sided building the work was really being done. :|

Comment on Re: NSA's FoxAcid

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Re^2: NSA's FoxAcid by morgon (Priest) on Nov 22, 2014 at 02:21 UTC
Afaik Larry himself was working on an NSA-project (or at least some project that was indirectly funded somehow by the NSA, I can't remember the details) at the time when he created Perl. For further amusement here a quote from the 2005 "State of the Onion (http://www.perl.com/pub/2005/09/22/onion.html): Some of you have heard the part about my looking for a good name for Perl, and scanning through /usr/dict/words for every three- and four-letter word with positive connotations. Though offhand, I can't explain how I missed seeing Ruby. So anyway, I ended up with "Pearl" instead. But it's a little known fact that one of the three-letter names I considered for quite a while was the word "spy."	[reply]

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Re^2: NSA's FoxAcid
by morgon (Priest) on Nov 22, 2014 at 02:21 UTC

For further amusement here a quote from the 2005 "State of the Onion (http://www.perl.com/pub/2005/09/22/onion.html):

Some of you have heard the part about my looking for a good name for Perl, and scanning through /usr/dict/words for every three- and four-letter word with positive connotations. Though offhand, I can't explain how I missed seeing Ruby. So anyway, I ended up with "Pearl" instead.
But it's a little known fact that one of the three-letter names I considered for quite a while was the word "spy."

[reply]