It's an interesting question. My first programming language was BASIC, which I just put in all caps because it's an acronym. Yet I've also see it called Basic. Similarly, I took FORTRAN (WATFIV/S, to be specific) at Waterloo, but no doubt it was called Fortran by some, without attracting too much attention.

But the Perl community seems to attract the kind of attention to detail gang that makes a big deal out of whether it's 'PERL', 'Perl' or 'perl'. When I type it on the command line, it's lower case, but that's because Unix/Linux is case sensitive; PERL and Perl aren't recognized, but I bet they are on Windows, which (I believe) is case insensitive. Because Perl is a programming language, and a proper name, it's OK to give it an initial cap, so 'Perl' it is. Yes, there's a ridiculous backcronym so the name could be capitalized as PERL; but in the end, the community has chosen *not* to capitalize the name in common usage.

My team lead is a big fan of Ruby, and since it's a programming language, I'd capitalize it, even though (I just tried this) it's 'ruby' at the Linux command line. (Cool! print 'foo!'; works!)

While there are pedants who descend like locusts on newbies and shriek about how wrong 'PERL' is, I think Perlmonks is relatively low-key about this -- they'll mention it, but it won't be the first thing in their reply.

I hope.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

In reply to Re: To Perl or not to PERL. by talexb
in thread To Perl or not to PERL. by jethro

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