I first learnt of Perl in the late 90’s. Sometime around ’98 or ’99. Fresh on the heels of BASIC, I was yearning to try out something new when I heard of Perl. I heard it’s what the Internet ran on and it had an almost mythical air to it that made me want to learn it. If you wanted to build dynamic web sites at that time, you had few options, and Perl, Apache and UNIX was the workhorse. I wanted to build dynamic web sites so what I had to do was pretty clear. There was a new fangled thing called Java, but no way was it ever going to catch up to the dominance that Perl had over the Internet. Or so people thought.

Perl was the undisputed king of Internet 1.0. The language, with it’s knack for text processing coupled with it’s highly expressive syntax was ideal for building dynamic web sites. I saw how entwined Perl was in the UNIX sub-culture and how naturally it fit in, and together with Apache/mod_perl how it was poised to reign over the Internet for years to come. I then drifted into the world of enterprise Java and progressed from the monstrosity that was J2EE to the present day JEE, which has since redeemed itself and paid for it’s early sins, and when I came back several years have passed and Perl has been relegated to the position that new kids considered old and dead. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

In the often misunderstood syntax of Perl by those new to the language, who claim it to be cryptic or arcane, there’s an elegance and a beauty that is not always present in other languages and I find that I enjoy hacking on a Perl script more than chipping away at the Java mega-structures. It’s expressiveness and how you can mold the code to fit your pattern of thought by the many variations and permutations the language syntax offers plays a large part in this sense of aesthetic. There’s something about the language that’s reminiscent of a Bach fugue and poetry. I certainly do not feel the same way about Python, although Ruby comes a little close.

I don’t think I will ever stop coding Perl, and Perl 6 has a number of interesting language elements that I hope someday I will get to see, possible running on a GNU/HURD. Now wouldn’t that be a sight to behold?