Under a banner proclaiming the "Programming Republic of Perl," Larry Wall delivered his State of the Onion address. The crowd ate it up.
Wall is the principal author of Perl, a computer language so essential to the functioning of the World Wide Web that many of your favorite sites would be worthless without it. He's become a hero in the programming community, and not just because of the quality of the software.
So it was no surprise that he drew fervent applause at the Perl Conference 2.0 in San Jose, Calif., at the end of the summer. It was the second annual gathering of programmers and Web-heads, more than 1,000 strong at this year's confab, who have helped make Perl such a precious resource.
In an interview after his speech, Wall summed up his philosophy of Perl with some catchy aphorisms: First, "There's more than one way to do it." Second, "Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible."
Perl is a leader in the "open source" movement, also known as "freeware," in which users freely download and use software. With open-source software, the original programming source code--the instructions programmers use to tell a computer how to behave--is also open to inspection, debugging and enhancement by other programmers who are then supposed to return their improvements to the wider user community.
Making money with freeware is fine, but the money tends to be made on services related to the software.
Perl isn't the only popular open-source product, nor the best known. Netscape gave the genre a huge boost this year when it contributed its popular browser, Navigator, and some related Internet software to the open-source movement. Linux is a Unix-like operating system that has gained all kinds of attention, and millions of users, in recent years.
Apache is a hugely popular Web server program, used to dish out Web pages and other information from Web site computers to browsers. Sendmail, an e-mail program, is almost ubiquitous among Internet service providers. And so on.
Perl has emerged as the most revered product in an essential niche. It has been called the glue that holds the Web together--a reasonably accurate description, says Dan Shafer, editorial director at Builder.com, a Web-building arm of the C-Net on-line technology news service. The Internet consists of wildly disparate kinds of computers and software, Shafer notes, and one of Perl's great contributions has been the way it helps Webmasters link various technologies in coherent ways.
