... and fight fire with fire, both legal vs legal and humour vs humour.

A wonderful response. Points to the Pro Bono lawyer Mr Kaplitt.

The world needs more like him.

What is the 'industry standard' anyway? If we're going to have one how about 0.0001. One error in 10 million lines. I mean, if we've got 0.66 for the linux kernel and its say 7 million lines thats 4620 errors. Now do the same math with x zillion LOC for (add you favourite: Windows, Oracle, ...) and its rather frightening.

Yeah, me too. About 6 years ago (we can call that 'recent' from a Perl perspective can't we?).

I'm a programmer that became a sysadmin. Perl is there, right down the pipe: shell based tools, connect to whatever DB you want, publish data via web applications, munge text data however you want ... This is the schtuff that I need, regularly. And wherever I'm moving CPAN is there. I can do it on *NIX, I can do it on *doze, just code up my little bits and get it done.

Perl wins by the power of applicability. Yes, python can do many if not all of the above, and I recommend python for people learning to program. But I'm an old *NIX guy, and after a little study (required for any new language) it is 'hand in glove'.

As for 'cats on keyboards' and other illegibility assertions: you can do that in any language. Write req specs, and design docs, even if brief, and remember that there are two programmers in every project: you and you in 12 months. Comments in code are like the units in data; contextual meaning.

My heartfelt thanks to L Wall and the perl community, everywhere. Long may we be able to write what we want, where we want, how we want !!

Happy birthday Perl :-D