Perl (#59)

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Author: kspalaiologos

book/languages/perl/README.md

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+# Welcome
+
+> This chapter has been authored by  Krzysztof Szewczyk "Παλαιολόγος".
+
+Welcome to the Perl chapter! I'd like to let you know a bit more about this famous language.

book/languages/perl/advantages.md

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+# Advantages
+
+Perl derives most of its syntax from well-known languages and tools common in UNIX-like operating systems.
+
+Becoming a good programmer with Perl, with previous knowledge of C, Shell script, Sed, Awk and other UNIX tools
+is relatively easy. Perl is **really** easy to learn!
+
+Perl with CPAN has a module to do pretty much anything you'd ever want to do and even more for things you
+probably don't want to do.
+
+Perl is a very entraining language to work (like C or Assembly) because of the freedom it provides.
+
+Perl is stable and predictable - it just requires basic UNIX knowledge and decent Perl intuition.
+
+Finally, Perl has developed text processing capabilities to the extreme - You want to strip newlines from input? Check it out:
+
+```pl
+$_ = do { local $/; <> };
+s/[\n\r\t ]+//g;
+print;
+```
+
+As you can see, it's pretty simple and compact!

book/languages/perl/conclusion.md

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+
+# Conclusion
+
+Perl is amazing text processing language and there is no other tool that can beat Perl in this discipline.
+
+Perl is very definite. As a simple example, let's check out the classic "Hello World" program. Here it is in C:
+
+```c
+int main(void) {
+    printf("Hello World!\n");
+}
+```
+
+And here it is in Perl:
+
+```pl
+print 'Hello World!';
+```
+
+Get in, get out, while getting the job done. Whenever you need help with Perl, you can always
+check welcoming community of comp.lang.perl.

book/languages/perl/disadvantages.md

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+
+# Disadvantages
+
+The language has a bad reputation because of the "write only" way code can be produced in it, but, to be honest, you can write
+obfuscated code in all languages, some make it more difficult (Assembly, Java), some make it less difficult (JavaScript, Perl).
+
+Perl is easy to write, hard to write well. You will need a lot of experience to write good Perl code.
+
+Perl isn't geared for User Interfaces. To this day I can't figure a simple way to create UI.
+
+If you did years of Linux, bash, C, sed, awk, etc., for you Perl may seem intuitive. But if you came from Windows, and you don't
+have enough UNIX experience, a lot of the "intuitive" stuff probably looks totally insane. If you were forced to maintain such
+"write-only" code, you'd be probably angry.
+
+Finally, using prefixes like $, @ and % on identifiers isn't a good way to express your type system. Sigils are coming from
+BASIC-like languages. Ideas that BASIC initiated in general aren't very good practices today.

book/languages/perl/history.md

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+
+# History
+
+Larry Wall developed Perl in 1986. He was a systems programmer on a project that was developing multilevel, secure wide area
+networks. Larry was in charge of installation. Larry's primary job was system support "guru". During this stint, he developed
+several useful UNIX tools such as rn, patch, and warp. Perl was developed in response to a management requirement for a
+configuration management and control system. Larry's manager asked him to produce reports. Larry's first thought was to use awk to
+produce the reports. Awk couldn't handle opening and closing multiple files based on information in the files. Larry didn't want to
+code a special purpose tool just for this job, so a new language was born. You'll find a reference to the former five-letter
+version in the entry for the acronym Practical Extraction and Report Language. The manual page was only 15 pages long. But Perl was
+faster than sed and awk and began to be used on other aspects of the project. Larry moved on to support research and development
+and took Perl with him. Perl was becoming a good tool for system administration. Larry borrowed Henry Spencer's regular expression
+package and modified it for Perl. Then Larry added most of the goodies he and other people wanted and released it on the Internet.

book/languages/perl/intro.md

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+
+# Introduction
+
+Perl is an interpreted language optimized for processing arbitrary text files, extracting information, and printing reports.
+It is also a good language for system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical, easy to use, efficient, and
+complete, rather than beautiful-tiny, elegant, and minimal. Perl was written by Larry Wall, with help of other contributors.
+
+Perl is bundled with various Linux distros and other UNIX-like systems. You can install it on Windows (R).
+
+Perl is interpreted. This can be either an advantage or disadvantage, depending on your needs. For example, Perl has a short
+development cycle compared to compiled languages, but it will never reach their efficiency.
+
+Perl is written to be practical. This means that it's complete, easy to use and relatively efficient.
+
+Let's dive into Perl' history!