“Eventually the revolutionaries become the established culture, and then what will they do?”
–Linus Torvalds
They say one should never start with an apology, so here goes: I’m sorry, but this essay will be all over the map. But then, given that I too am all over the map (and by extension, so is Perl), this kind of wandering is entirely inevitable. So I’ll do my best to keep this story roughly organized in a chronological order because the history of Perl is suggestive of various principles that you may see in operation elsewhere.
Or maybe not…
PERL 0 Gestation
Sex makes babies.
Like the typical human, Perl was conceived in secret, and existed for roughly nine months before anyone in the world ever saw it. Its womb was a secret project for the National Security Agency known as the “Blacker” project, which has long since closed down. The goal of that sexy project was not to produce Perl. However, Perl may well have been the most useful thing to come from Blacker. Sex can fool you that way.
Not only was Perl born of a sexy project, but its early design came from heavy cross-pollination.
Genetically speaking, of course, Perl has many more ancestors than that simple diagram above indicates. (I’ve left out theology and biology, for…
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