Perl 5's greatest accomplishment is the huge amount of reusable libraries developed for it. Where Perl 4 had forks to connect to databases such as Oracle and Sybase, for example, Perl 5 had a real extension mechanism. Larry wanted people to create and maintain their own extensions without fragmenting Perl into thousands of incompatible pidgins--and it worked.
That technical accomplishment was almost as important as the growth of a community around Perl 5. People write libraries. People build on the work of other people. People make a community worth joining and preserving and expanding.
The Perl community is strong and healthy. It welcomes willing participants at all levels, from novices to core developers. Take advantage of the knowledge and experience of countless other Perl programmers, and you'll become a better programmer.
Hey! The above document had some coding errors, which are explained below:
- Around line 1:
-
Unknown directive: =head0