Re: Some Help for a Report About Perl (Perl Culture and History References)

Others have discussed the Perl langauge in general. Here I focus on Perl culture and history.

The Perl culture of having fun is what attracted me to Perl. I found it so refreshing compared to the boring corporate IBM/Microsoft-dominated software engineering culture that dominated my life back then!

In particular, I enjoy Perl golf, Perl obfu and Perl poetry. To give you a feel for what these activities are about:

The Lighter Side of Perl Culture (Part IV): Golf - History of Perl golf
The Lighter Side of Perl Culture (Part III): Obfu - History of Perl obfu
The Lighter Side of Perl Culture (Part V): Poetry - History of Perl poetry
The Lighter Side of Perl Culture (Part I): Introduction - Six part series on the lighter side of Perl culture
BooK proposes a new Perl secret operator (Secret Operator References) - Perl secret operators

The Top Ten Perl Obfus - Top Perl obfus posted at Perl Monks.
The Top Ten Perl Poems - Top Perl poems posted at Perl Monks.

Drunk on golf: 99 Bottles of Beer - Should give you a feel for what the game of Perl golf is all about. Golf spread to other languages and is nowadays known as code golf.
The golf course looks great, my swing feels good, I like my chances (Part I) - Six part series for the serious golfer.
The History of Acme::Bleach and Acme::EyeDrops - Explains the history of an Acme CPAN module I wrote. BTW, CPAN is a huge part of Perl culture.

Some nodes that compare Perl with other languages you may know:

Tales from writing a RPN evaluator in Perl 5, Perl 6 and Haskell - Compares and contrasts the same program written in Perl 5, Perl 6 and Haskell.
Rosetta PGA-TRAM - Compares and contrasts the same program written in Perl, Python, Haskell and C++.
Two Different Languages: Two Similar Books (PBP and CCS) - Compares Perl with C++
Unix shell versus Perl - Compares Perl with Unix shell
Rosetta Code: Long List is Long - Compares Perl with C++ (see especially the many replies from marioroy)

To learn more of the history of the Perl programming language take a look at:

Perl - wikipedia has basic info on Perl history
Perl Timeline - history of early Perl culture up to 2001
The First Ten Perl Monks - History of the Perl Monks web site
perlhist - official history of Perl releases
perlsecret - on CPAN by BooK