This is a meditation that motivates me each time I think of it. It is like a prayer.

Perl is God's Swiss Army Knife of the Internet. You can do pretty much everything you want that concerns the Internet with Perl. I should rather ask: "What can't be done that concerns the Internet with Perl?"

I am wondering if Perl is the first language that has almost no limitation in this field. Of course, we should not forget that there are other languages, but they could not replace the power of Perl (I'm thinking for example about Rebol, which is powerful for specific purposes, but which is such a tiny subset of Perl; and about PHP also, another language designed for a specific purpose; and about Java also - which has a really strong set of libraries, including networking libraries, but that will never replace Perl - when I use Java, it is mostly because of its user interface libraries.) I don't want to forget mentionning the birth of this bastard language called C#, developped by Big Brother, which is nothing else than MicrosoftJava - a scary thing, but this would rather be another post in the discussion section, where the evil forces can be cited so that our novices could possibly avoid them... for sure, C# won't replace Perl.

Some people talk sometimes about the death of Perl. Well, for us, it is like the death of our God, the Eternal Father Who we love so much and Who gives us a goal everyday and rewards our monastic community work. Let us write prayers in the Poetry section, for those people so that they discover, someday, the Truth: Perl, is THE Web language. If you don't feel like you have enough imagination, then read the poetry of others to lift up your mind.

Amen. .
  • Comment on Perl, God's Swiss Army Knife of the Web

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RE: Perl, Dog's Swiss Army Knife of the Web (Ozymandias: From corkscrew to screwdriver)
by Ozymandias (Hermit) on Jul 13, 2000 at 19:18 UTC
    People talk about the death of everything useful and popular. It could almost be a defining characteristic of popularity and usefulness, that a certain segment of the population will proclaim it outdated and about to die.

    The reason it won't happen - and the reason why Perl is the "Swiss Army Knife of the Internet" - is that it continues to change and evolve. Perl will not stay the same, but it will still be there. Swiss Army Knives change; they took off the corkscrew and replaced it with a screwdriver. Perl can do the same.

    - Ozymandias

[reply]
      What will keep perl alive is that people keep adding to it. People like Nik Ing-Simmons ( wrote Perl\Tk ) keep adding and adding to it. Think of it as Larry Wall as the father owning a house and everyone of his children ( anyone who writes Perl ) has access to build another room on his house.
      The beatings will continue until morale raises.
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RE: Perl, God's Swiss Army Knife of the Web
by davorg (Chancellor) on Jul 13, 2000 at 19:27 UTC
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RE: Perl, God's Swiss Army Knife of the Web
by barndoor (Pilgrim) on Jul 13, 2000 at 19:56 UTC
    And it's not just the web. I've never written a web app in Perl but use it every day as a powerful alternative to shell scripts. All my system scripts and batches are written in Perl. The programmers Swiss Army Chainsaw (whatever your coding)
[reply]
      I agree. I too have never written an internet app. However, I find Perl very well-suited for general purpose programming (maybe that's why it's a general purpose prgramming language). It is very diverse and very powerful. OK I am going to stop kissing Perls ass now.

      redmist redmist.dyndns.org redmist@users.sourceforge.net
[reply]
      Yes, this is certainly true. I took the web as my example, because this is without doubt what makes my relationship with Perl a success, but knowing a little about the text file handling capabilities of Perl, the launching of processes, the fact that you can even write a Win32 evil-application in Perl proves what you just said: Perl is a chainsaw and with lots of horse power.

      I have also heard some programmers claiming that Perl is sexy, but this is another story :-)
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RE: Perl, God's Swiss Army Knife of the Web
by Poetic Justice (Monk) on Jul 14, 2000 at 09:18 UTC
    I like the term, "Swiss Army Knife", but I tend to agree with Dr. Dobbs Journal, Perl is Programmer's Duct Tape. It doesn't just hold a system together, it also is quite useful for fixin' what's broken. "Licenses.....We don't neeed no steeeekin' licenses....
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