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by RandalSchwartz 5412 days ago
If I'm just a footnote in the history of Perl, you're woefully ignorant.
1 comments

Maybe more. I'm certainly no Perl historian. But if I were, and I were writing a book about it, I doubt I would include a lot of biographies.
If you're not interested in how the lives of human beings create history, then please write about natural history (e.g., physics, chemistry, geology, zoology), not human history. Perl, as software, may instantiate a mathematical ideal, but a history of Perl must talk about its connection to a community of programmers, and Mr. Schwartz is most certainly a leading light of that community.
If "author of first book about Perl" doesn't make your book, you're a pretty poor writer.
Nothing I said was meant to be taken personally, so please stop with the ad hominems. I apologize if I offended you. I didn't mean to imply that your life and work are not important. I just don't feel like every single biography is worthy of ``the sum of human knowledge'', even if that person's work is. I guess that's not a fashionable opinion to have in the post-Twitter era, especially on a website where people submit their .vimrc files as potential ``hacker news'', but it is my opinion and I'm sticking to it.
It's not about being taking personally. It's just a fact: I wrote (with Larry Wall) the first book about Perl. And then the second book about Perl, which became the seminal teaching guide. If that doesn't deserve a note in the Perl history, you're confused.
Yes, but you would mention "The Camel Book", by Larry Wall and Randal L. Schwartz, right? Or that the capitalization "Perl" was coined by Randal (or so Wikipedia's Perl page claims)? And the "Schwartzian Transform" is kind of famous.