in reply to Do you cite a programining lang?

Since there's no formal specification you cannot cite the specification. If I were in the position you are in, I'd do one of the following:
  1. Cite Programming Perl. The advantage is that it's a book, so you can include authors, publisher, dates, ISBN, etc and, if necessary, point to page numbers. It also has Larry Wall as one of the authors, and its text is highly regarded. The disadvantage is that it describes perl 5.6 and that's likely not the version you worked with.
  2. Cite the URL of the source tarball. This is the most accurate, assuming you didn't use a Perl that was modified by your vendor. It does have all the disadvantages of URL citing though: it's non-traditional, the resource may go disappear, or worse, the URL may point to something else than it did at the moment you wrote the citation.
  3. Cite the p5p mailing list (and/or its archive). Very unorthodox, but that is the (public) place where perl5 development happens.
  4. Cite it as: "Larry Wall", [pumking of the version you used], et al.: "The Perl Programming Language, version XXX", [year of its release]. Possibly with a URL to the tarball.
Thinking about it, I probably would go for option 4.

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Re^2: Do you cite a programining lang?
by jhourcle (Prior) on Oct 16, 2008 at 14:29 UTC

    One other option -- cite something announcing / reviewing the particular release. If you have to, even cite the perldelta for the version. I would assume the author for the perldelta would be the pumking for the release.

    Update: And another random thought (and why I mentioned citing a reference, rather than directly) -- there's been an issue in scientific fields regarding how to cite the actual data used in the research, and I saw a talk last week at CODATA by Sünje Dallmeier-Tiessen, where she discussed an journal for the publication of earth science data. They have a standard template for presenting important aspects of the data (where to get it, provenance, coverage, etc.), and have a peer-review process ... so that people can cite the article describing the data set, and standard bibliographic tracking will pick up the relationship.

    I have no idea how often it's necessary to cite programing languages, but if it happens often enough, it might be worth people working together to create a similar journal for people to announce major updates to programming languages.

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