Larry Wall – Present Continuous, Future Perfect (2006)

2 adityaathalye 1 9/12/2025, 1:01:23 PM perl.org.il ↗

Comments (1)

adityaathalye · 50m ago
TIL: these delightful portmanteaus "whipuptitude" and its fraternal twin, "manipulexity".

Quote:

How Perl Entered the Unix Universe (2:06)

Anyway, speaking of paleontology, I dug up this fossil. It's kind of a dinosaur egg. And when Perl was first starting out this was how people saw the universe. If you were a Unix programmer you either programmed in C or shell. And there really wasn't much in between. There were these little languages that we used on top of shell, but that was the big divide. The big revelation that hatched Perl, as it were, was that this opened up into a two-dimensional space. And C was good at something I like to call manipulexity, that is the manipulation of complex things. While shell was good at something else which I call whipuptitude, the aptitude for whipping things up.

So Perl was hatched. As a small egg.