On this date in 1987, Larry Wall released Perl to a newsgroup.  For you non-geeks, this is the equivelant of celebrating the day that someone first demonstrated super glue to the masses.

Perl is one of my favorites.  Honestly, I learned to script in Perl before I learned shell scripting in sh or ksh.  My first tech job in the Army was big on Perl, so I learned Perl as I was learning to be a SysAd.

Perl is a bit of a jack of all trades scripting language, being good at a lot of things, but not as good at most of them as languages that are specialized.  For example, a lot of Internet code used to be written in Perl, but most now is written in PHP or some other language that is specific to the web.

I get the feeling that I’ll still be using Perl in one form or another for a long time.