Well, if wetting my pants in public saved the world, I'd do it, but I'd still be pretty ashamed about it....

As for history: I found Perl while using SCO Xenix/286. I actually did the original port of Perl to a mixed 16/32-bit architecture -- but that's probably a Meditation for another day. SCO Xenix was thoroughly behind the times -- it didn't support the "#!" feature until long after BSD-based systems did. So I started trying to figure out how to run a Perl program as easily as the users of more modern systems because I was, yes, too lazy to type "perl programname" a hundred times a day or create two files for each script. The breakthrough was realizing that Perl and shell both understood eval STRING, but they had different ideas about where statements end.

BTW, SCO's Bourne shell would use the C shell to run any script whose first character was a "#". That's why Perl to this day ignores a first line that starts with a colon....

    -- Chip Salzenberg, Free-Floating Agent of Chaos