zach on The conversation that led to Ruby being called Ruby

Comment on The conversation that led to Ruby being called Ruby

  keiju> But, perl is related to a shell.
  matz> Oh, I don't know that
  matz> never noticed that

Whoa. So today I learned that. Never noticed that either, all this time.

bitops 15y

Can you explain? I didn't understand this part of the conversation.

rhygar 15y

PERL is something you use for scripting inside of a SHELL.

The name comes from the fact that pearls are formed within a creature that has a shell.

Ruby is another precious stone like a pearl.

mnemonicsloth 15y

Pearls are formed in response to constant irritation over a long period of time.

rkowalick 15y

This is one of the funnier HN comments I have seen in a long time.

Gave me a solid 5 minute chuckle.

wazoox 15y

Precisely, after constant irritation with sh, awk and sed programming.

bitops 15y

Aha! Never made that connection. Thanks!

draegtun 15y

Shell as in a pe[a]rl oyster.

seanalltogether 15y

Seashell > Computing Shell

Pearl > Perl

dpapathanasiou 15y

Was that a happy coincidence after the fact?

I always thought the official name was "Practical Extraction and Report Language", or perl for short.

At least that's according to the man pages on my linux machine.

jholman 15y

May I suggest that if you (by "you" I mean the parent and siblings of my comment) are going to speculate, you might consider reading the Wikipedia article before going off in all directions. It's even got sources for some of the claims (although not all).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#Name

jamesbritt 15y

I always thought the official name was "Practical Extraction and Report Language", or perl for short.

I think that's a backronym (albeit from L. Wall).

http://wordsmith.org/words/backronym.html

mnemonicsloth 15y

Supposedly, perl was originally pearl. Practical Extraction and Report Language. The 'a' got dropped because Larry wanted the name to be a four-letter word.

slowpoke 15y

I thought it was "Perfect Emacs Rewriting Language".

Comments