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darobin (1316)

darobin
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http://berjon.com/

Journal of darobin (1316)

Saturday February 01, 2003

11:14 AM

advocacy

[ #10333 ]

I'm curious, back in the very early days of Perl when awk and sed were king, how was Perl advocated? Did the very first perlians hang out on all unixy newsgroups and throw elegant Perl solution at problems people were asking (and expecting to see solved otherwise)? Did it start up serendipitously? Was the trick passed on from mouth to ear until all of a sudden there was a sizeable community?

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Yeah, it was me, alright... (Score:3, Insightful)

by merlyn (47) <merlyn@stonehenge.com> on 2003.02.01 12:35 (#16619) Homepage Journal
Did the very first perlians hang out on all unixy newsgroups and throw elegant Perl solution at problems people were asking (and expecting to see solved otherwise)?
Yes, I hung out on comp.unix.questions and comp.unix.shell before comp.lang.perl got its start, and answered nearly every question with a 1-2 liner in Perl.
It got to the point where people would post a question, and at the end say "no perl please". I'd of course gleefully ignore that, or also post a non-Perl solution as well just to show how much longer it was.
And this was Perl 3. Nothing fancy.
--
- Randal L. Schwartz
- Stonehenge
Reply to This
- Re:Yeah, it was me, alright... (Score:2, Interesting)
  
  by oneiron (2615)
  
  I noticed a most interesting name among the NO voters for comp.lang.perl (1989) [google.com]. :-)
  Was the reason for the NO vote a desire to continue to gleefully ignore the "no perl please" pleas from the Unix folks?
  
  --
  /-\
  - Re:Yeah, it was me, alright... (Score:3, Funny)
    
    by merlyn (47)
    Heh... I didn't remember doing that until you brought it up... but it was up there because I expected the group to pass by overwhelming numbers, and wanted to stand out in the vote. And now here it is, over a decade later, and my trivial rebellion is recorded for all to see.
    
    --
    
    Randal L. Schwartz
    
    Stonehenge
Ghettoization (Score:3, Insightful)

by barries (2159) on 2003.02.01 16:30 (#16625)

Larry has pointed out in the past that he put off getting a newsgroup so that they would not be ghettoized. This gave perlers a legitimate reason to fly the Perl flag on non-perl channels as long as there was no Perl channel.
- Barrie

Reply to This
- Re:Ghettoization (Score:2)
  
  by darobin (1316)
  
  Interesting. I guess we should've done the same thing with SVG, have people hang out on Flash lists instead of jumping straight into having our own lists (even though those have several thousand subscribers).
  
  I guess it's too late now and we'll have to turn to other forms of advocacy, such as bothering editors and the such.
  
  --
  -- Robin Berjon [berjon.com]
filtering (Score:1)

by jmm (276)

In addition to Randal's perl mogering in the early days (and he didn't mention that "just another Perl hacker" dates back to those days), there was a significant amount of precedent when Larry made his famous comment about a shell to perl translator ("just filter it through Tom Christiansen").