Perl is a messy, maddening programming language, the “duct tape of the internet.” But at least you can tell it was made by humans.

An experiment by computer science researchers shows that Perl, a major commercial programming language, is no more intuitive to use than a fake language with a completely random syntax. What gives?

spider.pl is a program for fetching documnts from a web server, and outputs the documents to STDOUT in a special format designed to be read by Swish-e. The spider can index non-text documents such as ...

My colleagues use my Perl programs and some of them have cygwin installed on their PCs. cygwin has a dir.exe and my Perl programs attempt to use this when I call dir from within my program.