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Comment by zach | Hacker News Reader

  keiju> But, perl is related to a shell.
  matz> Oh, I don't know that
  matz> never noticed that

Whoa. So today I learned that. Never noticed that either, all this time.

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Can you explain? I didn't understand this part of the conversation.

PERL is something you use for scripting inside of a SHELL.

The name comes from the fact that pearls are formed within a creature that has a shell.

Ruby is another precious stone like a pearl.

Pearls are formed in response to constant irritation over a long period of time.

This is one of the funnier HN comments I have seen in a long time.

Gave me a solid 5 minute chuckle.

Precisely, after constant irritation with sh, awk and sed programming.

Aha! Never made that connection. Thanks!

Shell as in a pe[a]rl oyster.

Seashell > Computing Shell

Pearl > Perl

Was that a happy coincidence after the fact?

I always thought the official name was "Practical Extraction and Report Language", or perl for short.

At least that's according to the man pages on my linux machine.

May I suggest that if you (by "you" I mean the parent and siblings of my comment) are going to speculate, you might consider reading the Wikipedia article before going off in all directions. It's even got sources for some of the claims (although not all).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#Name

I always thought the official name was "Practical Extraction and Report Language", or perl for short.

I think that's a backronym (albeit from L. Wall).

http://wordsmith.org/words/backronym.html

Supposedly, perl was originally pearl. Practical Extraction and Report Language. The 'a' got dropped because Larry wanted the name to be a four-letter word.

I thought it was "Perfect Emacs Rewriting Language".

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