Randal L. Schwartz

A Futility Closet post references a Perl "poem" over two decades old. I remember chuckling at it when it first appeared. Although it was published "anonymously", I'm pretty sure I know who wrote it. :)

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, …