in reply to Better than duct tape?

Well actually, there has been some concern raised with regard to the version of Perl shipped with Red Hat Linux 9.0 - See this summary from the perl5-porters list prepared by Rafael Garcia-Suarez and posted on http://use.perl.org. In short, set the environment variable LANG to C before building any modules.

As to the original reference of Perl as the duct tape of the Internet, I seem to vaguely remember some references dated back to 1997 or so. Searching with Google returns a number of references, but alas I haven't been able to find the original essay in which I read this term.

 

perl -le 'print+unpack"N",pack"B32","00000000000000000000001001011110"'

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re:x2 Better than duct tape?
by grinder (Bishop) on May 26, 2003 at 14:46 UTC

    Perchance you are thinking of Larry Wall's "When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct" quote? This appeared in his Perl, the first postmodern computer language talk.

    I know there are prior references, but I can't find them either. I was sure there were some in the man pages, but that's not so for Perls between 5.005_03 and 5.8.0

    _____________________________________________
    Come to YAPC::Europe 2003 in Paris, 23-25 July 2003.

[reply]
      I was rather amused when I actually used duct tape on a duct a few months ago. I was installing a sink in the laundry room, and had to fix the dryer vent hose.

      The time before that was when building a cooling manifold for my PC.

[reply]
Re: Better than duct tape?
by Abigail-II (Bishop) on May 26, 2003 at 16:35 UTC
[reply]

In Section Meditations