Perl lesson #2 (All about Perl)

Before I go any further with these tutorials, I'd like to give a brief introduction to what perl is and what makes Perl such a great programming language. You can't be good at a programming language until you know it from the inside outwards.


#1 A very brief history or Perl

Perl was originally created by Larry Wall while he was working with Unisys in 1987. After a while perl started to gain traction from many programmers who where attracted to it's easy to understand syntax as well as it's versatility. When coding in perl, it's very rare two people will do a task the same way. That's the beauty of Perl. Perl's motto is "There's more than one way to do it". And the motto is rightfully used. To this day Perl is still being developed by a team of dedicated volunteers and anybody can submit bug fixes.


#2 Perl Development

Perl releases happen in two stages (Developmental and stable). The developmental releases are more of a beta release and only to be used as reference or testing. By no means should you ever use a developmental release for any other purpose. Stable releases are the final version and are very stable. These happen every few years, where the major developmental releases happen about every year.

#3 Perl version numbers

*"Stable releases of Perl, intended for the general public have a version number x.y.z where z is less than 50. Cases where z is more than 0 are maintenance releases issued to fix any overwhelming bugs. This happens extremely infrequently. Between stable releases the porters work on the development track, (where y is odd). When 5.6.0 was released, work began on 5.7.0 (the development track) to eventually become 5.8.0. Naturally, releases on the development track happen much more frequently than those on the stable track."*

#4 What makes perl different?

Perl was designed for simplicity and easy comprehension. When you compare Perl to other programming languages you will notice that Perl seems to be more human. This is because Larry Wall designed it to be easy for humans to understand, rather than the computer. Most programming languages are designed to make it easier for the computer to understand.

#5 What do I need to work with Perl?

Perl is a very versatile language and has been ported to almost every desktop computing platform you can think of. Os x, Linux, BSD, Windows, you name it and Perl will run on it. Although Windows does not natively support Perl. You'll have to download Strawberry Perl. Once you have the perl runtime installed and set up you can write your code a variety of ways. You can write it in notepad, TextEdit, Context, BBedit, Nano (my favorite), Vi, you name it.


If you have any more questions feel free to ask and I'll add it up here.



* Excerpt taken from Beginning Perl (Simon Cozens)