The caption under the picture of ken and dmr both standing that attributes to the latter “their motivation was to build a system ‘around which a fellowship could form’” calls to mind quotes from The Lord of the Rings in comments at the top of perl’s source files. For example:
https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/perl.c#L15
In Ken Thompson recalls Unix's rowdy, lock-picking originsPerl
perl5
Perl2014–2025
Perl / perl5
perl5
🐪 The Perl programming language
33Distinct people
40Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
2.4KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
🐪 The Perl programming language
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
Because of the frequency I see undecipherable strings like this in actual Perl code, I don't like Perl the programming language. However, I love Perl the project. Take a look…
et2o used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year40 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2014-02-27 11:17:02 UTC to 2025-10-27 16:26:56 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 1 | 7 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Perl is Copyright (C) 1993 - 2026 by Larry Wall and others.
All rights reserved.
ABOUT PERL
Perl is a general-purpose programming language originally developed for
text manipulation and now used for a wide range of tasks including
system administration, web development, network programming, GUI
development, and more.
The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient,
complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). Its major
features are that it's easy to use, supports both procedural and
object-oriented (OO) programming, has powerful built-in support for text
processing, and has one of the world's most impressive collections of
third-party modules.
For an introduction to the language's features, see pod/perlintro.pod.
For a discussion of the important changes in this release, see
pod/perldelta.pod.
There are also many Perl books available, covering a wide variety of topics,
from various publishers. See pod/perlbook.pod for more information.
INSTALLATION
If you're using a relatively modern operating system and want to
install this version of Perl locally, run the following commands:
./Configure -des -Dprefix=$HOME/localperl
make test
make install
This will configure and compile perl for your platform, run the regression
tests, and install perl in a subdirectory "localperl" of your home directory.
If you run into any trouble whatsoever or you need to install a customized
version of Perl, you should read the detailed instructions in the "INSTALL"
file that came with this distribution. Additionally, there are a number of
"README" files with hints and tips about building and using Perl on a wide
variety of platforms, some more common than others.
Once you have Perl installed, a wealth of documentation is available to you
through the 'perldoc' tool. To get started, run this command:
perldoc perl
IF YOU RUN INTO TROUBLE
Perl is a large and complex system that's used for everything from
knitting to rocket science. If you run into trouble, it's quite
likely that someone else has already solved the problem you're
facing. Once you've exhausted the documentation, please report bugs to us
at the GitHub issue tracker at https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues
While it was current when we made it available, Perl is constantly evolving
and there may be a more recent version that fixes bugs you've run into or
adds new features that you might find useful.
You can always find the latest version of perl on a CPAN (Comprehensive Perl
Archive Network) site near you at https://www.cpan.org/src/
If you want to submit a simple patch to the perl source, see the "SUPER
QUICK PATCH GUIDE" in pod/perlhack.pod.
Just a personal note: I want you to know that I create nice things like this
because it pleases the Author of my story. If this bothers you, then your
notion of Authorship needs some revision. But you can use perl anyway. :-)
The author.
LICENSING
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of either:
a. the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation; either version 1, or (at your option) any
later version, or
b. the "Artistic License" which comes with this Kit.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See either
the GNU General Public License or the Artistic License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the Artistic License with this
Kit, in the file named "Artistic". If not, I'll be glad to provide one.
You should also have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program in the file named "Copying". If not, see
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
For those of you that choose to use the GNU General Public License,
my interpretation of the GNU General Public License is that no Perl
script falls under the terms of the GPL unless you explicitly put
said script under the terms of the GPL yourself. Furthermore, any
object code linked with perl does not automatically fall under the
terms of the GPL, provided such object code only adds definitions
of subroutines and variables, and does not otherwise impair the
resulting interpreter from executing any standard Perl script. I
consider linking in C subroutines in this manner to be the moral
equivalent of defining subroutines in the Perl language itself. You
may sell such an object file as proprietary provided that you provide
or offer to provide the Perl source, as specified by the GNU General
Public License. (This is merely an alternate way of specifying input
to the program.) You may also sell a binary produced by the dumping of
a running Perl script that belongs to you, provided that you provide or
offer to provide the Perl source as specified by the GPL. (The
fact that a Perl interpreter and your code are in the same binary file
is, in this case, a form of mere aggregation.) This is my interpretation
of the GPL. If you still have concerns or difficulties understanding
my intent, feel free to contact me. Of course, the Artistic License
spells all this out for your protection, so you may prefer to use that.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
40 sourcesI've always loved the recent[1] summary from `perlre`:
>o - pretend to optimize your code, but actually introduce bugs
1: I still think of it as a relatively new change, but it's from 2013: <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/commit/7cf040c1f649790a4040aec...>
In The /o in Ruby regex stands for "oh the humanity "This is one of the features that Ruby cribbed directly from Perl. The Ruby documentation seems really bad, in particular “interpolation mode” is grievously misleading.
Perl’s documentation is far more clear about the consequences:
(https://perldoc.perl.org/perlop#Regexp-Quote-Like-Operators)
o Compile pattern only once.
[…]
PATTERN may contain variables, which will be
interpolated every time the pattern search is
evaluated, except for when the delimiter is a
single quote. […] Perl will not recompile the
pattern unless an interpolated variable that
it contains changes. You can force Perl to skip
the test and never recompile by adding a /o
(which stands for "once") after the trailing
delimiter. Once upon a time, Perl would recompile
regular expressions unnecessarily, and this
modifier was useful to tell it not
Read the rest
to do so,
in the interests of speed. But now, the only
reasons to use /o are one of:
[reasons]
The bottom line is that using /o is almost
never a good idea.
In the days before Perl automatically memoized the compilation of regexes with interpolation, even back in the 1990s, it said,
However, mentioning /o constitutes a promise
that you won't change the variables in the
pattern. If you change them, Perl won't even
notice.
Perl 4’s documentation is briefer. It says,
(https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/perl-4.0.00/perl.man#L272...)
PATTERN may contain references to scalar
variables, which will be interpolated
(and the pattern recompiled) every time the
pattern search is evaluated. […] If you want
such a pattern to be compiled only once, add
an “o” after the trailing delimiter. This
avoids expensive run-time recompilations, and
is useful when the value you are interpolating
won't change over the life of the script.
I think possibly the most hilariously complicated instance of this is in perl’s tokenizer, toke.c (which starts with a Tolkien quote, 'It all comes from here, the stench and the peril.' — Frodo).
There’s a function called intuit_more which works out if $var[stuff] inside a regex is a variable interpolation followed by a character class, or an array element interpolation. Its result can depend on whether something in the stuff has been declared as a variable or not.
But even if you ignore the undecidability, the rest is still ridiculously complicated.
https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/toke.c#L4502
In Weird Lexical SyntaxPerl, at build time, get errno numbers of the system in a similar way[0]: preprocess errno.h with `$CC -E` and recursively scan all files in # markers for macro defines.
The configure script even checks the existence of several system headers this way, so if your C compiler don't support # markers in -E output, you get missing includes everywhere.
[0] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/ext/Errno/Errno_pm....
In Consistently Making Wrong Decisions Whilst Writing Recreational Chah, I'm the same too, straight to 'perl -lne'. I believe that was one of Larry Wall's goals when creating Perl:
> Perl is kind of designed to make awk and sed semi-obsolete.
https://github.com/Perl/perl5/commit/8d063cd8
In Regex character "$" doesn't mean "end-of-string"Perl is also pretty impressive. If not by documented count of operating systems, at least by real diversity.
https://github.com/Perl/perl5/tree/blead/hints
https://www.cpan.org/ports/archive-2011-03-26.html
In Curl on 100 Operating SystemsPerl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed
246 points · Open discussionNah, it’s waaaaay older than that. It’s been done from the beginning of machine-produced HTML.
The probably slightly newer aspect is producing an intermediate representation that is then serialised to HTML, though I think that’s still going to be back in the ’90s. But the oldest examples I know of (while I was yet a small child) used functions and methods to produce serialised HTML strings directly, which was more efficient (at least in the languages in question) and also allowed you to mingle with string templating.
Perl’s CGI.pm let this example be written no later than 1997 (no idea when it was actually written, can’t be bothered searching harder for older than CGI.pm 2.32): https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/54310121b442974721115f936...
For stuff that worked on the frontend, it’s still way older, though it tended more to XML-based stu
Read the rest
ff like XSLT (… which still works in browsers now, e.g. https://chrismorgan.info/blog/tags/meta/feed.xml is an Atom feed but the <?xml-stylesheet?> processing instruction is basically a pointer to the file for the browser to use to convert it to HTML which it then renders). But there were definitely things in this vein even on the frontend in active use more than five years before Mithril, though I can’t be specific as my memory is fuzzy as I wasn’t paying much attention to it all back then.
> How are there more Roff projects on GitHub than there are projects in Julia or Haskell or Perl?
Presuming it encompasses nroff and troff, manual pages and other documentation, combined with forking of such projects? Even Perl has a roff file: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/cpan/podlators/t/da...
In The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2023When I'm evaluating an open-source project, I always check the quality of its commit messages. I don't care about following a specific format or something, all that matters is whether they are informative or not.
Sadly, Odin doesn't seem to pass the test. It's full of commits labeled with just "fix <thing>": https://github.com/odin-lang/Odin/commits/master
A few examples of projects with better commit messages:
Linux kernel: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commits/master
gcc: https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/commits/master
Perl: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/commits/blead
Wayland: https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland/commits/main
In I like Odin> This happened to Voyager 2 not too long ago, where it was returning invalid and random data. Turns out, it was a bit flip
This also happen to the Magellan probe. Larry Wall was at NASA at that time and added the hex and bit string format specifiers to the pack function in perl so they could fix and recover the data: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/commit/24f4b7dabc8
In Engineers investigating NASA’s Voyager 1 telemetry dataFactual sources:
https://gist.github.com/Grinnz/be5db6b1d54b22d8e21c975d68d7a...
https://github.com/Perl/perl5/wiki/Perl7-FAQ
In Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)long ago I submitted code to perl to help it run nicely on AIX workstations that were at use at Intel at the time: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/3e25f6d2dce9289bf3894d673...
Then in 1999, Red Hat files an IPO and offers free shares to open source developers. That blurb in the perl source got got me included in the Red Hat IPO but the email was so strangely worded I assumed it was spam and deleted it. Oh well.
In Perl Turns 34 TodayI didn't realise the tests[1] existed back in 1987. Presumably one of the longest continuously maintained test suites.
Using what's now called Test Anything Protocol[2] (TAP).
[1]: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/commit/8d063cd8450e59ea1c611a2...
[2]: https://testanything.org/
In Perl Turns 34 TodayShowing the 15 most recent of 40 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.