Hidden Gems of Perl.com

Jan 4, 2018 by David Farrell

A few months ago, as I was familiarizing myself with the old Perl.com source material, I kept getting distracted by these wonderful articles that I hadn’t read before. Now that the site has relaunched, and the old articles lovingly restored, I thought I’d share a few of these hidden gems with you.

Here be Wizards

Where Wizards Fear to Tread was a brief, perlguts-focused series started by Simon Cozens. This particular article discusses the Perl op tree.

I’d love to rekindle this series. If you have a Perl internals article that you’d like to write, please get in touch with me or see our contributing guide and send us a pull request with a draft article.

Naughty Perl

In the old Perl.com source code, I came across several raw documents which didn’t appear to have been officially published on the site, but did contain good content. For example Tom Christiansen’s article The Seven Deadly Sins of Perl is a fun read worthy of your time. Can you count how many of the “sins” have been addressed since then?

Just code it in Perl (6)?

Why not Translate Perl to C? is a sobering reminder by Mark Jason Dominus that re-writing Perl as C often won’t yield faster programs. The article ends with optimistic speculation that Perl 6 may use gradual typing and static data structures to deliver better performance. Fast-forward a few years, and good news! Perl 6 supports sized and typed data structures.

MJD regularly blogs at his own site.

State of the Onion

Larry has a good number of articles on Perl.com, including some of the oldest. The 2nd State of the Onion was published way back in August 1998, and it’s still an entertaining read (or re-read if you’ve forgotten it).

More to come

There are more articles to recommend, but for the sake of brevity I’ll stop here. In the meantime feel free to explore the site; you never know, you might stumble upon another … hidden gem!

Cover image by Shachar Harshuv