Dear Final Debug: I’ve been using Perl to solve problems ever since I was in college. But with so many client-side scripting solutions available now and even a server-side version of Java, is Perl ...

Feel free to light 25 candles today for “the duct tape of the Internet,” or if you prefer, “the Swiss Army chainsaw.” By either of its future nicknames, version 1.0 of the Perl programming language ...

Let me get this out of the way up front: Perl isn’t a beautiful language. It’s kind of a mongrel pup with pedigreed academic roots: C, AWK, Lisp, Pascal, sed, and a bit of Smalltalk and C++ tossed in ...