
Perl and the birth of the dynamic web - MilnerRoute
https://opensource.com/life/16/11/perl-and-birth-dynamic-web
======
jlgaddis
Wow, that brings back some memories.

As a teenager, I'd played with the various BASICs and eventually scored a copy
of Borland's Turbo Pascal IDE and compiler. After the "web" came about, like
everyone else at the time, I discovered HTML and started making web pages
(such as this [0] amazing example of creative artistic design) but that
quickly became boring.

At some point, I stumbled across Matt's Script Archive (mentioned in the
article), formmail.pl [1], the guestbook [2] (mine [3] is still around,
apparently), and so on. These scripts were _amazingly_ popular at the time.

Anyways, I gained my first bits of Perl knowledge from reading through those
scripts and modifying them. Nowadays, as a network engineer and sysadmin, Perl
is still pretty much the first tool I reach for to help me do my job.

 _Edit:_ Just checked and the earliest timestamp on the files in that "web
site" is 1997-05-19. That web site is almost 20 years old.

[0]: [http://qsl.net/n9wwv/420.html](http://qsl.net/n9wwv/420.html)

[1]:
[http://www.scriptarchive.com/formmail.html](http://www.scriptarchive.com/formmail.html)

[2]:
[http://www.scriptarchive.com/guestbook.html](http://www.scriptarchive.com/guestbook.html)

[3]:
[http://qsl.net/n9wwv/gbook/guestbook.html](http://qsl.net/n9wwv/gbook/guestbook.html)

------
rurban
For me as old-time perl'er in Europe the birth of the web was PHP, not perl. I
started using perl with perl4 to support my lisp programming. Yes, the
relevant xkcd has some moments of truth.

perl CGI scripts were always considered to simple and insecure, and mod_perl
in Apache too hard. This totally changed with PHP. Every webhoster offered PHP
support but rarely proper perl CGI support with all the needed modules. PHP
had everything included, was faster and had basic web support, esp. sessions
and many core modules included.

Perl was a good hacking tool but not good enough for the web. I heard in the
US this was different.

With Plack/Catalyst/Dancer this became different, but now also PHP7 matured to
a proper language, ruby and rails came up, while perl stagnates since decades.
perl6 is not the solution as the change is too disruptive. With my cperl, a
perl11 (5+6) with classes it might get better, but there are no classes yet.
At least my perl compiler is now stable and offers memory and startup
improvements, and easier deployment. Which is important on the web.

