Perl is a general-purpose programming language. The answer to the question "Can I do this in Perl?" is very probably "yes". It's often used for little system administration tasks and for CGI and other web stuff, but that's not the whole story.—Ten Perl Myths
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Perl as a Natural Language

Perl works the way you do. One of the Perl mottos is "There's more than one way to do it". People approach tasks in very different ways, and sometimes come out with very different solutions to the same problem. Perl is accommodating—it doesn't force any particular style on you, (unless you ask it to) and it allows you to express your programming intentions in a way that reflects how you as a person think about programming.—Ten Perl Myths

The parallels between Perl and a natural language like English are striking. Larry Wall, the father of Perl, has extensive scholastic training as a linguist. Larry applied his linguistic knowledge to the creation of Perl, and thus, to the new student of Perl, a digression into these language parallels will give the student insight into the fundamentals of Perl.—Perl as a Natural Language

You learn a natural language once and use it many times. The lesson for a language designer is that a language should be optimized for expressive power rather than for ease of learning. It's easy to learn to drive a golf cart, but it's hard to express yourself in one.—Natural Language Principles in Perl

Natural language has words of various sorts: nouns and verbs and such. If someone says "dog" in isolation, you think of it as a noun, but you can also use the word in other ways. That is, a noun can function as a verb, an adjective, or an adverb when the context demands it...Perl also evaluates words differently in various contexts.—Natural and Artificial Languages

Perl is regarded by both its proponents and detractors as something of a grab bag of features and syntax. The difference between the two camps lies in whether this is seen as a virtue or a vice. Perl votaries maintain that this varied heritage is what makes the language so useful. Reference is often made to natural languages such as English and to evolution.—Wikipedia:Perl

One thing I've come to realize...is that perl is unique among the languages that I know. Perl is the only computer language I know of that is so complete as a language. Like a spoken language, perl is highly context-sensitive and one idea can take many different forms. It's deterministic and precise, of course, but it has a much more natural feel...Perl uses lots of implications and context, like a spoken language does. It's really a marvel in some ways, because it's a group of people agreeing on a real language, rather than simply a set of commands...Perl is unique because it's actually a full language that allows very imaginative expression, much like english...I don't know how all this relates to the cost-effectiveness of programmer time, but it's interesting, that's for sure.—Exegesis 7 Released

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Of the LAMP stack, Perl has the best defect density,
well passed standard deviation and better than the average.
—Study Ranks LAMP Code Quality

Speed

mod_perl embeds Perl in the Apache web server
for complete access to the Apache C API in Perl!

Perlcast Interview #45: mod_perl
MP3—Play this page as an MP3 playlist

Also see FastCGI, SpeedyCGI, Apache::SSI, Hello World! benchmarks.

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Culture

We were halfway through starting writing Perl 6 when the drugs took hold. Suddenly the code started shifting and crawling, taking on a life of its own. We knew at that point that the community was about to explode.—Hunter S. Thompson dies before Perl 6 is released

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    Last edit 2011-10-10 10:35 by dimitri (diff)