The rage emoji reminds me of the expression “to use with anger”, which has come into vogue on HN in the past year or so.
vt. to use for a real task, as opposed to just testing it out.
“Has anyone used this in anger?”
http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/use-i...
Here is a 1998 Usenet posting in alt.sysadmin.recovery that uses it:
https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.sysadmin...
The message ID is: slrn756lf3.9lm.nik@catkin.nothing-going-on.org
Ah, slrn; what I'm using today. :)
However, Philip Wadler (famed FP computer scientist) used this phrase in a February 1998 article called "Functional Programming: An angry half-dozen":
http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/course/2003/pllab/print-files/wadle...
The paper says that a postdoc colleague, a dozen years earlier (thus 1986) asked Wadler about his new bicycle: "have you used it in anger yet?"
Wadler may have introduced this as a meme pertaining to programming languages or constructs. In any case, if he did actually glean it from someone else's internet posting about a programming language being used in anger, he's sure not admitting it in this paper.
It predates usage in the context of Perl, or any other software. Indeed it probably predates the existence of software :-)
I think it originates in a British military context (i.e. shots fired in anger rather than in training).
Edit: These answers [1] include a citation from 1798. Sorry if you actually just meant first use in a software context.
[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30939/is-used-in...