Perl's raison d'être

By Xah Lee. Date:

Hi Adeger,

I came here late, and i see a lot people have already gave you baggy opinions and factoids. Still, blind and deaf can't tell you all about Perl.

Perl's gluing ability goes beyond computation, to people. To the poor and have-nots. It unites people in the computing field who are not endowed with fancy engaging brains. It is the sanctuary of dunces. The expressions of those thoughtless. The godsend for brainless coders. The means and banner of sys admins. The lingua franca of trial-and-error hackers. The song and dance of stultified engineers.

I'm also a Perler. Share a secret with me: When you are cornered by mathematicians or the like, who are about to speak lamba or something we don't understand, what do you do? Of course, flip out the little Swiss Army Knives in our pockets, and splutter #%$@ syntaxes that is equally abstruse, and we feel safe and secure. FAAK geniuses in this world. Leave Perlers along. Larry Wall for President. The three principal virtues of …

You mentioned the surplus of Perl libraries? Say, CGI, LWP, WWW, HTML, DBI, File::, etc and etc and etc? Yes I _know_. I have serious experience wallowing in this giant dung pile. Yes I KNOW! If you are in a cesspool for long, you will forget about shit but start to enjoy swimming. It is intriguing to say the least. You discover backstroke, develop efficiency in freestyle, enjoys relaxed breast stroke, and even dabble and splash in butterfly to impress your friends. You begin to be amazed by the wonders and size of the pool, don't you? Me too, pal. Me tooo.

I think comrade Glauber is incorrect. First of all, he got our mantra wrong. It is: The three characteristics of Perl programers: mundaneness, sloppiness, and fatuousness. Secondly, our language is not evolved to support no faaking real life no shit. Our language, is designed to be a faakup from the very beginning. Designed, to faak up those computer scientists. FAAK up their teachings. FAAK up their students. FAAK up their languages. FAAK up their correctness. FAAK up their theories. Remmeber, P is for Practical.

  Xah
  xah@xahlee.org
∑ http://xahlee.org/
  perl5 -e'print "just another f@%#!^& perl moron.\n"'

Perl Cult