For things done only in spare time, wasn't that how Larry Wall originally released Perl?

Nope. He was building a system to help two systems communicate across the country and let his laziness get the better of him.

I thought he was trying to process logs..?

I thought he was trying to process logs..?

It's nice to think that. Actually Larry was trying to find the the rabbit as quickly as the KGB, but really the Perl story should go like this:

- NRO satellite photos show unidentified creature with long ears.
- Appears to be eating elongated orange object.
- NSA reports unusually high frequency of the character string "rabbit" in intercepted communications.
- Larry Wall, a young and upcoming hacker, helps to decode the communications with a new language he calls "Perl".
- Larry Wall appointed to high-level governmental committee to study the problem and make recommendations.
- State Department tries to get allied support for a preventative strike against attack rabbit network reported to have been recently activated.
- Delta force rumored to be hunting rabbits in Mojave Desert.
- CIA tries to infiltrate agents into target area. But station chief has cover blown by investigative reporter from the Iranian newspaper "Hares-bullah Star and Crescent".
- 6th Fleet sets sail for Middle East on routine training mission, planned months in advance.
- Helicopter assault group gets lost in sandstorm, with heavy casualties resulting.
- Rabbits pose with corpses, proclaim a great victory.
- Air Force jets bomb rabbit hutch, hitting nearby chicken coop instead. Some jets lost to unknown enemy countermeasures, chicken feathers reported near engines of downed jets.
- Rabbit disappears into desert with badly scratched paw.
- Decides to become a pacifist and go into pharmaceutical business.

As per reinventing the wheel . . . Linux . . . Open Office . . . GNU . . . Perl . . . UNIX . . .

Each of those things were created because existing wheels were simply not round enough in one way or another. Linux was created because Tannenbaum wanted to spend his time as a professor, not as king of the hackers (as he himself put it in a recent essay). Open Office was simply an Open Source version of StarOffice, built out of a need for an office suite not made by Microsoft. GNU reinvented all kinds of wheels for mostly political reasons. Perl and Unix were created because of the ineffectiveness of existing tools.

In my mind, there are two reasons for reinventing wheels, as the examples above show: 1) existing wheels are not good enough (either for technical or political reasons), or 2) you want to learn how to do it on your own.

#2 is usually not relevent in a business environment, because its hard to justify to your boss that you should spend a lot of time coming up with a solution that someone else has already solved and is freely giving away. OTOH, it might be done during off-moments at work or other spare time. #1 will be the more likely case.

Right - Linux, OpenOffice, Unix, C, even Perl, were all things that someone built in spite of there already being something similar out there. And the people did many of these things on their own, for the love of the work and not for the money. Come to think of it, even Einstein wrote his three major papers (including the special theory of relativity) in his spare time.

In my experience, most bosses are too caught up in the so-called bottom line, that they overlook how much valuable stuff is done by people on their own. They usually can't see beyond the next financial report. But that's OK. Many of us do for fun what others wouldn't do for money. Getting paid would kind of take the fun out of it, IMNSHO.

I don't know... I've only read that Larry Wall wanted a better way for working with Sed and Awk than was available. Much is not easily accessible from before ~1992 when Larry Wall open sourced perl.

As per Linux, I was pretty sure, that was also built out of the free time of Linus Torvalds, as a basement project to see if he could actually make something as good as Minix. Now, I know I will tick off the Minix users on this forum, but I think that Linus created something slightly better than Minix :)

OpenOffice, I will agree with. Though that was more that Linux wanted to grow as a Desktop OS, rather than just as server OS. Unix and C grew together. New features in C allowed for new features in Unix. New features in Unix allowed for new features in C. C, was a logical extension of BPL(I think it was BPL), which never really grew in spite of languages... just an evolutionary matter.

-- Jamie Payne

Much is not easily accessible from before ~1992 when Larry Wall open sourced perl.

I was using perl in 1990, back when Open Source was called "freeware", and that was perl 3.0xx. See perldoc perlhist for more details...

Michael

I don't know... I've only read that Larry Wall wanted a better way for working with Sed and Awk than was available. Much is not easily accessible from before ~1992 when Larry Wall open sourced perl.

The perl source has been available since Larry released perl 1.0 back in 88. You can find this out, look at the source, and discover many other interesting Perl facts, at http://history.perl.org/.

I thought it was built by Ken Thompson out of the need for a system on which to play Adventure, and the availability of a system without an OS.

--
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I thought it was built by Ken Thompson out of the need for a system on which to play Adventure, and the availability of a system without an OS.

Not Adventure, but rather "Space Travel".