MAC to Linux
A Glimpse at Perl
Perl Pre-History

Not many people are aware that the earliest contributions to transformational grammer were made by the Indian grammarian Panini thousands of years ago. Even less (1) are aware that the development of the perl programming language was foreshadowed by a Greek philosopher whose name may have been Oystermenides.

Just as the Mannerist Period of Art followed the High Renaissance, so Oystermenides followed the Classical Period of Greek philosphy that we associate with Plato and Aristotle.

The following quotes have been attributed to Oystermenides:

• "Comedy is better than Tragedy"
• "left is better than right; down is better than up"
• "philosphy is fun or it's a waste of time"
• "any philosphy that gives priority to orderliness is misguided."
• "philosphy should be weaved together to fit life, not life changed to fit philosphy"
• "Logos without community is Loco"
• "UNIX is better than NT" (2)
• "all translations are inherently tainted"

So how is this relevant to perl? Rather than forcing programmers to fit their thinking into rigid forms of logic as in languages such as COBOL, FORTRAN, ALGOL, C, C++, PL/1, etc.

• perl is designed to fit the strange psyches of programmers.
• perl is more like cartoon music than like classical music or baroque, etc.
• perl is intended to enhance life rather than deaden the soul of the programmer.

Footnotes:
• (1) hopefully
• (2) either he was incredibly ahead of his time or some perl hacker has done a global replacement on the computer versions of some ancient texts