Editing Perl (section)

== Community ==

Perl's culture and community has developed alongside the language itself. [[Usenet]] was the first public venue in which Perl was introduced, but over the course of its evolution, Perl's community was shaped by the growth of broadening Internet-based services including the introduction of the World Wide Web. The community that surrounds Perl was, in fact, the topic of Wall's first "State of the Onion" talk.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://grnlight.net/index.php/programming-articles/100-perl-culture |title=Perl Culture (AKA the first State of the Onion) |first=Larry |last=Wall |author-link=Larry Wall |date=2014-05-22 |access-date=May 22, 2014 |archive-date=May 22, 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140522141559/http://grnlight.net/index.php/programming-articles/100-perl-culture |url-status=usurped}}</ref>

State of the Onion is the name for Wall's yearly [[keynote]]-style summaries on the progress of Perl and its community. They are characterized by his hallmark humor, employing references to Perl's culture, the wider hacker culture, Wall's linguistic background, sometimes his family life, and occasionally even his Christian background.<ref>{{cite web |title=2nd State of the Onion |last1=Wall |first1=Larry |author1-link=Larry Wall |url=http://www.wall.org/~larry/onion/onion.html |access-date=2012-10-12 |archive-date=July 17, 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120717014443/http://www.wall.org/~larry/onion/onion.html |url-status=live}} (Search for 'church')</ref> Each talk is first given at various Perl conferences and is eventually also published online.

In email, Usenet, and message board postings, "Just another Perl hacker" (JAPH) programs are a common trend, originated by [[Randal L. Schwartz]], one of the earliest professional Perl trainers.<ref>{{cite newsgroup |last1=Schwartz |first1=Randal L. |author1-link=Randal L. Schwartz |title=Who is Just another Perl hacker? |message-id=m1hfpvh2jq.fsf@halfdome.holdit.com |newsgroup=comp.lang.perl.misc |date=1999-05-02 |url=https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.perl.misc/nK-lswsaMec/DBL87v4FxOwJ |access-date=December 5, 2014 |archive-date=July 8, 2012 |archive-url=https://archive.today/20120708165748/http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.acorn.programmer/browse_thread/thread/b5fd3717bda6a8d0/d4d3e151a783dffa?lnk=gst&q=ioc%23d4d3e151a783dffa#!msg/comp.lang.perl.misc/nK-lswsaMec/DBL87v4FxOwJ |url-status=live}}</ref> In the parlance of Perl culture, Perl programmers are known as Perl hackers, and from this derives the practice of writing short programs to print out the phrase "Just another Perl hacker{{sic|,}}". In the spirit of the original concept, these programs are moderately obfuscated and short enough to fit into the signature of an email or Usenet message. The "canonical" JAPH as developed by Schwartz includes the comma at the end, although this is often omitted.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.perlmonks.org/bare/?node_id=443856 |title=Canonical JAPH |access-date=2011-05-16 |last=Schwartz |first=Randal |author-link=Randal L. Schwartz |date=2005-03-31 |publisher=[[PerlMonks]] |archive-date=July 22, 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110722055125/http://www.perlmonks.org/bare/?node_id=443856 |url-status=live}}</ref>

{{Anchor|Perl golf}}
Perl "golf" is the pastime of reducing the number of characters (key "strokes") used in a Perl program to the bare minimum, much in the same way that [[golf]] players seek to take as few shots as possible in a round. The phrase's first use<ref name="perl-golf-coined">{{cite newsgroup |last1=Bacon |first1=Greg |title=Re: Incrementing a value in a slice |message-id=7imnti$mjh$1@info2.uah.edu |newsgroup=comp.lang.perl.misc |date=1999-05-28 |url=http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.perl.misc/msg/7b97c434492c8d20 |access-date=2011-07-12 |archive-date=July 7, 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110707134412/http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.perl.misc/msg/7b97c434492c8d20 |url-status=live}}</ref> emphasized the difference between pedestrian code meant to teach a newcomer and terse hacks likely to amuse experienced Perl programmers, an example of the latter being JAPHs that were already used in signatures in Usenet postings and elsewhere. Similar stunts had been an unnamed pastime in the language [[APL (programming language)|APL]] in previous decades. The use of Perl to write a program that performed [[RSA (algorithm)|RSA]] encryption prompted a widespread and practical interest in this pastime.<ref name="rsa">{{cite web |url=http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/pureperl.html |title=RSA in 5 lines of perl |access-date=2011-01-10 |last=Back |first=Adam |archive-date=January 19, 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110119154503/http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/pureperl.html |url-status=live}}</ref> In subsequent years, the term "[[code golf]]" has been applied to the pastime in other languages.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://codegolf.com/ |title=Code Golf: What is Code Golf? |publisher=29degrees |year=2007 |access-date=November 26, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120113152453/http://codegolf.com/ |archive-date=January 13, 2012 |url-status=dead |df=mdy-all}}</ref> A Perl Golf Apocalypse was held at Perl Conference 4.0 in Monterey, California in July 2000.

As with C, [[obfuscated code]] competitions were a well known pastime in the late 1990s. The [[Obfuscated Perl Contest]] was a competition held by [[The Perl Journal]] from 1996 to 2000 that made an arch virtue of Perl's syntactic flexibility. Awards were given for categories such as "most powerful"—programs that made efficient use of space—and "best four-line signature" for programs that fit into four lines of 76 characters in the style of a Usenet [[signature block]].<ref name="gallo03">{{cite book |last1=Gallo |first1=Felix |title=Games, diversions, and Perl culture: best of the Perl journal |chapter=The Zeroth Obfuscated Perl Contest |editor= Jon Orwant |publisher=O'Reilly Media |year=2003 |chapter-url=http://oreilly.com/catalog/tpj3/chapter/ch43.pdf |access-date=2011-01-12 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091122114544/http://oreilly.com/catalog/tpj3/chapter/ch43.pdf |archive-date=November 22, 2009 |df=mdy-all}}</ref>

Perl poetry is the practice of writing poems that can be compiled as legal Perl code, for example the piece known as "[[Black Perl]]". Perl poetry is made possible by the large number of English words that are used in the Perl language. New poems are regularly submitted to the community at [[PerlMonks]].<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1590 |title=Perl Poetry |access-date=2011-01-27 |publisher=[[PerlMonks]] |archive-date=September 27, 2007 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070927000904/http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1590 |url-status=live}}</ref>