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Introduction

Many developers would hate to have their master-work described as a mess, but not Larry Wall, creator of Perl and celebrity hacker. The way he sees it, the language is a mess because the problem domain — real life — is also a mess. He has a point.

I first came across Perl a few years ago when I was writing a program that required a certain amount of ‘screen-scraping’ from a telnet session, the ability to retrieve files using FTP, some complex processing and interaction with an Oracle database. This is a fairly messy problem, and one that Perl looked eminently able to solve.

It is now two days after Microsoft’s official release of ‘the next generation’ of their premier operating system, Windows 2000 (n?e, NT5). We’re now at a safe distance to be able to assess the impact it has had on people and the press.

The first interesting thing to note is that on Slashdot, the Internet’s favorite site for hacker-oriented hi-tech news, did not make any announcement. One argument is that Slashdot is Linux, or at least Unix, biased making Windows news irrelevant. I don’t buy that. What Microsoft is doing is important if Linux is to achieve world domination.