I remember unpacking PERL from usenet and compiling it on my Xenix box!
Really back then it was amazing. At the time I was writing everything in C and having the flexibility without the pain of C that PERL provided was such a great gift. I wrote literally 100,000's of lines of PERL (one project alone was 25k LOC) and enjoyed it all the way up until maybe 1993!
CPAN is hard to beat, having modules that work, etc. But I won't defend PERL because the reality is I almost never use it anymore. Not because there is something wrong with it, just because more often I run into problem sets that either require me to return to C (Think 45,000 QPS under 4 ms response time) and/or web stuff my dev team is more comfortable with on PhP.
PERL transformed my life and my thinking. It taught me that "Just because you CAN do something a particular way doesn't mean that you SHOULD do it that way.".. I took this much further then PERL and learned to apply it to all my projects and started writing in the "right language for the problem set". Instead of trying to fit every problem to the handful of languages I could program at that time.
Now I write in so many languages and utilize so many platforms and systems that the concept is just part of who I am when I am presented with a new problem to solve. For that I owe Larry a lifetime of beers whenever he wants one I'll be there to buy it for him! :-)
I have discussed this very topic with Larry Wall. His criteria for a name were: short, unique, and whimsical.
He wanted it to be short because he was going to type it a lot. He wanted it unique so that he could use grep to locate all Usenet discussion on it in all newsgroups. (Yes, he was pulling the Kibo trick.) And what sold him on whimsical was the presence of the 2 different possible acronyms: Practical Extraction and Reporting Language, Perfectly Eclectic Rubbish Lister. He therefore included both in the documentation from day 1.
Larry himself is not particularly dogmatic on the capitalization. But as you can see in the link you posted to his original Usenet post he did not think of it as an acronym. He was at that point capitalizing it Perl or perl depending on where it appeared in the sentence.
However long ago the capitalization of the language became a litmus test for whether you had exposure to the community. See http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=510594 for evidence of that.
$ perldoc perl | tail -n 14
Perl actually stands for Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister, but
don't tell anyone I said that.
NOTES
The Perl motto is "There's more than one way to do it." Divining how
many more is left as an exercise to the reader.
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience,
and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
perl v5.14.2 2012-07-12 PERL(1)
In conversation with Larry Wall I found out that the existence of two reasonable backronyms was part of why he chose to call it Perl. Therefore the backronyms were known before the name itself was finalized.
Really? I have never heard that before. I have heard that it was going to be "Pearl" but there was something else out there with that name and so it ended up "Perl".
My source is conversation with Larry Wall at lunch at OSCON in, I believe, 2006.
And yes, I've heard the Pearl claim before. As well as the claim that the original acronym was going to be Practical Extraction And Reporting Language.
All of the claims that I have heard fit together if you assume that the actual sequence of events was this. Larry wanted to name it pearl for whatever combination of reasons. Came up with a nice acronym for it. Decided not to name it pearl for whatever combinations of reasons. Was playing around and came up with the Perfectly Eclectic Rubbish Lister. Preferred that over pearl for various reasons (not in use, greppable, likes puns, etc). And therefore named the language perl. Therefore the language name is not an acronym, but both popular backronyms predate the actual language name.
I was not present. But this is my best guess as to what did happen.
And I remember that day because it took me a couple days to get it to compile on Xenix and my wife was pissed because all I did during the winter break was play with Perl programming. :-)
Really back then it was amazing. At the time I was writing everything in C and having the flexibility without the pain of C that PERL provided was such a great gift. I wrote literally 100,000's of lines of PERL (one project alone was 25k LOC) and enjoyed it all the way up until maybe 1993!
CPAN is hard to beat, having modules that work, etc. But I won't defend PERL because the reality is I almost never use it anymore. Not because there is something wrong with it, just because more often I run into problem sets that either require me to return to C (Think 45,000 QPS under 4 ms response time) and/or web stuff my dev team is more comfortable with on PhP.
PERL transformed my life and my thinking. It taught me that "Just because you CAN do something a particular way doesn't mean that you SHOULD do it that way.".. I took this much further then PERL and learned to apply it to all my projects and started writing in the "right language for the problem set". Instead of trying to fit every problem to the handful of languages I could program at that time.
Now I write in so many languages and utilize so many platforms and systems that the concept is just part of who I am when I am presented with a new problem to solve. For that I owe Larry a lifetime of beers whenever he wants one I'll be there to buy it for him! :-)