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2Perl Comes off the Wall
3The Camel
5Theres More than One Way to Do It
The Perl language is intended to be practical—easy to use, efficient, complete—rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). According to Larry Wall, Perl has two slogans: “There’s more than one way to do it,” commonly known as TMTOWTDI. The other is: “Easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible.”
6Check the Linguistics
7Support for Text
8Perl Is Sticky
9Whos Down with OOP?
10Perl Is Multiplatform
11Perls Recent Release History
Perl 5.6 – March 22, 2000 Summer 2000 – Development of Perl 6 was announced. Attempts to change Perl 5 in any major way were forthwith redirected to the Perl 6 project, as Perl 5 was now supposed to go into maintenance mode. Yet no one knew at that time that even 10 years later Perl 6 would be in no position to replace Perl 5 for the vast majority of its users.Perl 5.8 – July 18, 2002 Perl 5.10 – Dec 22, 2007 Summer 2009 – Jesse Vincent sets up release schedule, eventually takes over Perl Pumpking (Perl Development Manager), credited with re-energizing and focusing Perl improvements.Perl 5.12 – April 2010
12Perl 5.12 Is the Latest Perl Release
Pearl 5.12 highlights include: Perl’s time functions work beyond the year 2038. With previous versions of Perl for 32-bit Unix systems, it could only represent dates up to the year 2038, after which it wraps around back to 1970. It is especially important for financial services organizations that use Perl for applications such as mortgage and insurance contracts that run for 30 years or longer. This has been updated within the internal functions of 32-bit Perl 5.12.
13Improved Unicode Support
14Support for Pluggable Keywords
Extension modules in Perl 5.12 can now cleanly hook into the Perl parser to define new kinds of keyword-headed expressions and compound statements. The syntax following the keyword is defined entirely by the extension. This feature facilitates the development of DSLs (domain specific languages) within Perl by allowing a completely non-Perl sub-language to be parsed inline, with the correct ops cleanly generated. This feature is experimental and may be removed.
15Perl in the Enterprise
16Perl Uses
Perl is one of the three P’s—Perl/Python/PHP—in the LAMP stack. It is often used for: “gluing” programs together, extracting and integrating information between disparate repositories, graphics programming, system administration, network programming, applications that require database access, CGI programming on the Web.Other uses for Perl include developing games and managing high-volume, high-content Websites.
17Perl Built into Popular Operating Systems
18ActivePerl Makes Perl Easier
ActivePerl comes with PPM (Perl Package Manager) repositories to allow quick install and management of popular Perl modules without the need of compiler and make tools. ActivePerl comes with PPM repositories for all major platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, AIX). ActivePerl comes with preinstalled extra modules especially useful for IIS applications.
19Popular Perl IDEs (Integrated Development Environments)
Padre, the Perl IDE: A text editor that is simple to use for new Perl programmers but also supports large multilingual and multitechnology projects. ActiveState’s Komodo IDE: Komodo is an editor for Perl built on the Mozilla platform. It features extensible standard editor functionality, syntax checking and coloring, a regex debugging tool and more. Komodo also has a multilanguage editor and debugger for other languages such as Python, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript and Tcl.
20Perl Is Extensible and Flexible
21Perl Is in the Top 10
22Multiple Downloads
23Next Major Release: Perl 5.14
The next major stable release of Perl will be Perl 5.14, which is scheduled to be released within about one year. According to Jan Dubois, a Perl developer at ActiveState, major Perl releases used to happen every two years: 5.005 in 1998, 5.6 in 2000, 5.8 in 2002. Then it took five years to get to 5.10 in 2007 (5.7 and 5.9 were internal development tracks).
24Perl 6?
Perl 6 is a sister language, part of the Perl family. Perl 6 is not production-ready yet. However, developers can get involved with its development through the open-source process at http://www.perl6.org/.
25The Perl Foundation
The Perl Foundation is dedicated to the advancement of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design and code. The Mozilla Foundation is one of several sponsors of the Perl Foundation, and Slicehost provides hosting for the Perl Foundation.