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 ...

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

I write Perl programs that use the Windows shell command dir. The dir command is built into cmd.exe and there is no dir.exe in the System folder.

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?