Randal L. Schwartz

Came across an interesting video from one of the users of Perl: Is Perl dead? @Randal L. Schwartz on Dart and Flutter @Code Maven

I've been asked by a couple of Perl groups to give a virtual presentation. Writing new material that would only have been shown once is a lot of work for a small reward.

But, I just happened to be cleaning out my virtual junk drawer, and stumbled across my "half my life with Perl" slide deck that I had presented at OSCON 2013. Most of the stuff is timeless, as it describes Perl's first 25 years, and my second 25 years and how I influenced Perl, and Perl influenced me, and how my company (Stonehenge) was changed by all of this, and in some ways even changed all of this as well.

20 years ago, I really wanted the chat2.pl domain name, to commemorate the one piece of code I ever contributed to the core. I even wrote the .pl administrators, and got no response.

Well, guess what I have now! chat2.pl!

Behold the wonder that is:

# XXX hardwired $PF_INET, $SOCK_STREAM, 'tcp'

# but who the heck would change these anyway? (:-)

$pf_inet = 2;

$sock_stream = 1;

$tcp_proto = 6;

Why, SystemV, and later Linux, didn't follow BSD numbers, I'll never know, …

I uploaded File::Finder to the CPAN more than a decade ago. I was using it for a project today, and found a bug that has been in there in the beginning. I forgot to localize $_ in ->contains, which clobbered File::Find's $_, used by just about everything else.

I couldn't even remember where I had put the git repo for the distro source, and once I found that, I couldn't remember how to build and test modules.

I'm getting old.